Month: May 2016

The Missouri State Capitol. (credit: Missouri House of Representatives)

The Missouri House of Representatives has passed a bill prohibiting traffic ticket quotas—which ordinarily wouldn't be much of a tech news story, but this particular bill includes an entirely unrelated provision that would make it a lot harder for cities and towns to offer Internet service to their residents.

The traffic ticket bill was approved by the Missouri Senate without any municipal broadband provision. But when it got to the House, Republican legislator Lyndall Fraker proposed an amendment preventing cities and towns from competing against private Internet service providers unless they meet certain conditions or have a municipality-wide vote. The House approved the bill, including Fraker's amendment, on Monday.

Missouri is one of about 20 states that already have restrictions on municipal telecom services, but Fraker's proposal would make it more difficult for cities and towns to offer broadband. The amendment was described yesterday by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Community Broadband Networks project, which urged Missouri residents to contact the bill sponsors "and explain how you feel about amendments that do not relate to the substance of their bill."

Did you know that International Drone Day was a thing? It is, and the next one happens on Saturday, May 7. Organized under the slogan "Drones are good," model aeronautics clubs across the country are hosting events to show the world the good side of their hobby. Celebrations are even taking place in the Washington, DC region—home to some of the least-hospitable skies for unmanned aerial vehicles.

Twenty different UAV clubs are holding events on Saturday, including several that were grounded as recently as February. DC's airspace has been subject to a 30-mile "Special Flight Rules Area" ever since 9/11, split into inner and outer zones. All UAVs are banned within the inner 15-mile zone, a restriction that companies are hard-coding into drone firmware. But in December 2015, the FAA closed the entire zone to all drone traffic, effectively shuttering 14 area flying clubs.

However, the clubs and the FAA were able to resolve their differences by February, when revised rules for the region were put into place. Drones and other unmanned aircraft can take to the skies above DC's outer suburbs once again, as long as they weigh under 55lbs (30kg) and remain below 400 feet (121m), among other restrictions.

If you need this, you probably deserve this. (credit: ResetPlug)

It’s Monday night and you finally collapse into your favorite chair after a day that started at 5:00am. The dogs are crated, the kids are in bed, and your spouse has graciously agreed to do dinner clean-up. You lean your head back and sigh. There’s a whole week’s worth of worry stacked up in your forebrain, but for the next 20 minutes, none of it will matter. The tablet is warm in your hands as you tap the Netflix app, and you smile in anticipation of the one truly good thing that you’ll get to experience today. The theme song is already playing in your head: "Un—BREAKABLE! They’re alive, dammit! It’s a mir-a-cle!" For the next 20 minutes, you can escape.

…except you can’t, because instead of transporting you away from your worries, the stupid screen is showing a giant-ass error message: "Netflix is not available."

The vein in your forehead—you know the one, right at your hairline—starts throbbing. You can feel it. You know what comes next. You can already see it in your mind. You’re going to have to go upstairs into your youngest’s room—because for some incredibly insane reason the cable drop is in there, which makes you want to find the person who built the damn house and throttle them to death with six feet of coax—and you’re going to have to reach back under the kid’s bed, over the dust and the dog hair and the Lego bricks and broken Star Wars toys and whatever the hell else is under there and find the damn plug for the damn router. After you unplug and plug it back in, you’re going to have to lie there watching the damn lights on the stupid thing blink for minutes—whole minutes!—while your tiny window of Netflix time slowly trickles away.

(credit: Sean MacEntee)

Microsoft plans to retire support for TLS certificates signed by the SHA1 hashing algorithm in the next four months, an acceleration brought on by new research showing it was even more prone to cryptographic collisions than previously thought.

The software maker hinted at the expedited deprecation in November. Last week, it made those plans official. Sometime this summer (for those in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway) the general release versions of Microsoft's Edge and Internet Explorer browsers will stop displaying the address bar lock when visiting HTTPS sites protected by SHA1 certificates. The change will occur even sooner for upcoming Windows Insider Preview builds, which are mostly used by developers for testing purposes.

"This update will be delivered to Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 and Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, and will only impact certificates that chain to a CA in the Microsoft Trusted Root Certificate program," officials in the Microsoft Edge Team wrote. "Both Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 will provide additional details in the F12 Developer Tools console to assist site administrators and developers."

(credit: CFACT)

Duane Gish, a prominent critic of evolution, was such a prolific debater that, like Dr. Henry Heimlich, he had a maneuver named after him. (The use of either maneuver at a party, incidentally, signifies that things have become decidedly un-fun.) While arguing, Gish would issue a rapid-fire stream of claims—most of them false—about so many different topics, that it would be impossible for his opponent to respond to them all. This quantity-over-quality tactic became known as a “Gish Gallop.”

On Monday night I took in a new film called Climate Hustle. The title is meant to reflect its central premise: climate change is a scientific con. But I soon realized that it was also a decent synonym for the film’s Gish Gallop style. Climate hustle (n): a fast-paced, uninterrupted delivery of superficial and false claims about climate science.

Do the hustle

Climate Hustle is the product of Marc Morano and the conservative Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT). Morano, who has worked for Rush Limbaugh and Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), now runs a climate “skeptic” blog supported by CFACT and makes regular appearances on cable news shows. His shift into movies is, so far, rather limited; the film appeared in a number of theaters in the US (and one in Canada) for one night only. The audience for this singular event numbered about 15 at my (admittedly quiet) local theater.

The five qubits in IBM's quantum computer. (credit: IBM)

In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, IBM gave an unwary world its first publicly accessible quantum computer. You might be worried that you can tear up your passwords and throw away your encryption, for all is now lost. However, it's probably a bit early to call time on the world as we know it. You see, the whole computer is just five bits.

This might sound like some kind of publicity stunt: maybe it's IBM's way of clawing some attention back from D-Wave's quantum computing efforts. But a careful look shows that there is some serious science underlying the announcement.

The IBM system is, on a very superficial level, similar to D-Wave's. They both use superconducting quantum interference devices as qubits (quantum bits). But the similarity ends there. As IBM emphasizes, its quantum computer is a universal quantum computer, something that D-Wave's is not.