This week, our editorial team chose its favorite stories of the week. Because they are experts in their beats, we asked Dan Meyer, Nancy Liu and Emma Chervek to select from their own stories. Dan Muse and I chose from any of the stories published this week.

Our hope is that if you've been too busy to keep up with the news this week, we can give you five stories that are worth reading.

So here are our team's top five favorite stories of the week, in no particular order.

From Emma Chervek: “You’ve heard your tech vendors jumping to share how green they are, but does their environmental data tell the same story?”

Here's where major enterprise tech vendors stand in terms of sustainability targets and environmental impact – starting with Dell, IBM, Cisco, VMware and HPE.

From Dan Meyer: “Charlie Ergen this week merged his Dish Network and Echostar businesses in a move that could produce a 1 + 1 = 3 combined entity and more robust player in the 5G telecommunications space.”

The deal calls for Dish Network and Echostar to merge, with Dish Network shareholders controlling a 69% ownership stake in the new entity. That entity will also include Echostar’s Hughes Network Systems and count nearly 18 million total customers across Dish Network’s mobile telecommunications and satellite television services, and Echostar and Hughes enterprise/government connectivity verticals.

From Nancy Liu, who spent this week at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas: “Have you ever wondered if the public Wi-Fi at Black Hat is safe to use? Here is the answer.”

Black Hat can be a target for attendees to try attack techniques; the network ops center ensures the conference network remains stable and protected.

From editor in chief Dan Muse: “With all the focus on emerging technologies (and rightfully so), it's easy to forget that technologies such as MPLS that are decades-old are still the backbone of our infrastructure. Contributor Jeff Vance digs into why MPLS is not only not dead, but it's the lifeblood of many WANs.”

SD-WAN and secure access service edge vendors often deride MPLS, but if those critiques are accurate, why is MPLS still a force in the WAN market?

And last, but not least, the story I chose this week is from contributor Taryn Plumb. She reported on the White House's AI Cyber Challenge contest, which is offering up to $18 million as a kind of moonshot prize for developing new artificial intelligence (AI) cybersecurity tools. From the XPRIZE in the mid-1990s all the way back to the 18th century (and possibly earlier than that), prizes have been used to incentivize innovation, with quite a bit of success.

The contest goals are to both produce new AI cybersecurity tools and “show how AI can be used to better society,” said DARPA's Perri Adams.