Month: January 2016

Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, CA., home to Super Bowl 50 and the San Francsico 49ers. (credit: Travis Wise)

Federal authorities, who have been baffled by more than a dozen attacks on San Francisco Bay Area data lines, are probing whether there is any connection between that vandalism and the Super Bowl. The NFL's big game will be played February 7 at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, just south of San Francisco.

An Internal memo between the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and others says the agencies have no "credible threats to or associated with Super Bowl 50 or related events." But the memo, obtained by NBC's News 4 in Washington, DC, says the spate of fiber optic cable severings across the San Francisco Bay Area raises "the concern individuals may be using these incidents to test and prod network durability in conjunction with a more complex plot."

The FBI declined to respond to Ars' inquiry. A former FBI agent familiar with the memo, however, stressed that the authorities have not found any credible threats and that the agencies were considering every possible nefarious scenario they could think of before the big game.

Petitioner Supap Kirtsaeng in 2014. (credit: Doug Kari)

Supap Kirtsaeng built himself a business on eBay buying textbooks in Asia and reselling them to students in the US. That practice made him the target of a copyright lawsuit by John Wiley & Sons, a large textbook company that didn't like Kirtsaeng undercutting their US prices. Lawyers for Wiley said that they should control the right to import their copyrighted works.

Kirtsaeng won a resounding victory in 2013, when the Supreme Court said he was protected by the first-sale doctrine. He'd bought the books legally and could resell them, even if that involved moving the books across the border.

After his win, Kirtsaeng sought to get his attorneys' fees paid. In the US legal system, parties must generally bear their own expenses. However, copyright law allows for judges to "award a reasonable attorney’s fee to the prevailing party," at their discretion. Because of that provision, fee-shifting is more common in copyright cases.

On Saturday, regulators in California decided to hold off on a plan to capture and burn the natural gas that is leaking from a broken storage well just north of Los Angeles, citing the risk of a “catastrophic explosion,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

The well at the Aliso Canyon storage facility has been leaking since October 23, belching massive amounts of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas, into the air. Methane is not only bad for climate change, it’s also extremely flammable.

At first, California regulators wanted to take advantage of that property of methane by capturing and burning off the gas coming from the well. That would have reduced the methane’s impact on the environment somewhat while Southern California Gas, the company that owns the Aliso Canyon facility, finished drilling the relief well to plug the underground reservoir feeding the leak. As National Geographic noted in an article last week, "Flaring gas has a much lower impact on the climate than a vent directly into the atmosphere—the flame converts gas into an amount of carbon dioxide that will have 30 times less warming potential in the near term.”

Hot Octopuss, a sex toy company, provides Internet for anyone who wants to relieve a little stress. (credit: Hot Octopuss)

This month will see the first rollout of LinkNYC's free Wi-Fi hotspots in New York City, which are set to replace nearly 7,500 neglected public telephones. Along with this experimental urban upgrade, New Yorkers can also expect to see another pay phone replacement idea: a "GuyFi" booth where men can "relieve stress" with a laptop and chair behind a privacy curtain.

Last week, a sex toy company called Hot Octopuss converted an unused phone booth at 28th Street and 5th Avenue into its GuyFi chamber of self-love by adding a black privacy curtain, a chair, and a laptop with high-speed Internet. Clearly playing on the buzz about LinkNYC's upgrades to New York's pay phone infrastructure, Hot Octopuss sent out a press release explaining that this was all about health:

According to Time Out, a remarkable 39% of New Yorkers ‘self-soothe’ in the workplace to alleviate stress. Hot Octopuss has created the GuyFi booth to take this habit out of the office and into a more suitable environment designed to give the busy Manhattan man the privacy, and the high-speed Internet connection, he deserves.

The company reported that at least 100 men used the booth on its opening day last week. Of course, public masturbation is illegal—and a rep from Hot Octopuss told Mashable, "We may be insinuating that these booths could be used in whichever way anyone would like to 'self soothe,' [but] the brand is not actively encouraging people to masturbate in public as that is an illegal offense." No word on how fast the Internet connection was, or whether there would be any efforts to help women "self soothe" at a rate equal to men in the workplace.