Month: December 2015

On Saturday night around 9pm, above the northern California city of Martinez, a California Highway Patrol (CHP) officer was flying a helicopter over Highway 4, searching for a stolen car. According to SFGate, speaking to Officer James Andrews, spokesman for the CHP air operations unit, the pilot suddenly saw a red light just in front of the craft’s cabin window.

The pilot veered to the right to avoid a collision with the drone, which was flying at the pilot’s same altitude—between 700 to 800 feet. (Amateur drone operators are generally not permitted to fly higher than 400 feet.) The pilot then circled back, illuminating the drone with a spotlight. The pilot was allegedly able to watch the drone land and gave its coordinates to Martinez police.

According to SFGate, "A Martinez police officer spotted a man carrying a drone into his front yard.” The man’s information was forwarded to the CHP. He was not arrested. According to reporters from CBS San Francisco, the man was an exchange student from China, and he was flying a DJI Phantom 3 Advanced drone. His name was not released.

AT&T today launched its gigabit fiber Internet service in parts of Los Angeles and West Palm Beach and announced another 36 metro areas that will get the service at later dates.

AT&T's "GigaPower" service is available in 20 metro areas as of now, the company said in its announcement today. It launched first in Austin, Texas, in 2013.

Much of AT&T's 22-state telephone service footprint will remain stuck with slow DSL service, but AT&T agreed to deploy fiber to at least 12.5 million customer locations within four years in exchange for government approval to buy DirecTV. Including previous deployments, AT&T will end up building to more than 14 million homes and small businesses. This will make it one of the largest fiber deployments in the country, though still short of the roughly 20 million locations passed by Verizon FiOS.

The Palm Beach Post is fighting a Florida judge's order that it remove from its news site transcripts of recorded calls of a jailhouse snitch to protect the inmate's "right to privacy." (PDF) Last week's decision from Palm Beach County Circuit Judge Jack Schramm Cox also prohibited the news outlet, or "any other person currently in possession of the recorded calls," from publishing transcripts of the informant's taped jailhouse phone conversations.

"The U.S. Supreme Court has never upheld a prior restraint on pure speech, nor has (the newspaper’s) counsel found a Florida appellate decision upholding such a restraint," the Post wrote (PDF) a Florida state appeals court. The Post said that Cox was erroneously putting the rights of jailhouse informant Frederick Cobia above those of the newspaper and that inmates have no expectation of privacy when speaking on jailhouse phones. Jail signs caution inmates that their calls are being recorded, the newspaper's appeal said.

The Fourth District Court of Appeal declined to immediately block Cox's order but on Friday expedited (PDF) briefing on the matter.

SAN FRANCISCO—Former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges was sentenced Monday to 71 months in prison after he stole money from Silk Road dealers while investigating the site.

"This, to me, is an extremely serious crime consisting of the betrayal of public trust from a public official. From what I can see, it was motivated by greed," US District Judge Richard Seeborg told the court today. "No departure or variance is warranted in this case. I seldom find myself in the position of imposing a high-end sentence, but I find this is warranted in this case."

In addition to his sentence today, the judge ordered Bridges to forfeit the following property: $165,000 from Fidelity brokerage, $306,000 held in trust, and $4,000 from a PNC Bank account.

Customers of Green Mountain Power (GMP) in Vermont will be the first in the US to have Tesla Powerwall stationary batteries installed in their homes, according to the utility. Tesla’s home battery was announced in late April this year and attracted nearly 38,000 reservations in the first week after it was announced.

GMP says it will receive 500 7kWh Powerwalls in early 2016 with shipments starting in January. It will initially install the daily cycling batteries in the homes of 10 pilot customers, and then the utility will open order and installation to all customers.

Back in September, Tesla said that it would start providing Powerwalls for pilot installations, with power company SunEdison beginning installations in Australia in November. Tesla said 7kWh Powerwalls would be shipped first since those batteries have a chemistry that is made for daily cycling (filling up the battery from solar panels and using that power to run your home at night, for example). The 10kWh Powerwalls will not be shipped until later next year—these larger-capacity batteries will have a chemistry suited for backup use in case of a power failure, rather than daily use. Tesla has been clear that third-party installers will be the intermediary getting Powerwalls to individual consumers. Tesla only directly handles the installation and management of so-called “Powerpacks,” which are built for industrial- and utility-grade customers.

Last week, a San Bernardino couple armed with two .223-caliber assault rifles and two 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistols killed 14 people. And the very next day, the Senate voted against a measure that would have barred gun sales to people on federal terror watchlists. Another gun-control measure to expand background checks at gun shows and for online purchases also failed that same afternoon.

It was political theater at its finest, as the votes came as part of GOP legislation to repeal Obamacare and gut Planned Parenthood funding. So with gun control clearly off-limits, lawmakers are directing their attention to social media as a method to combat domestic terrorism.

The House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday will debate legislation (PDF) called the "Combat Terrorist Use of Social Media Act." Among other things, the measure requires a White House "policy that enhances the exchange of information and dialogue between the Federal Government and social media companies as it relates to the use of social media platforms by terrorists." What's more, the bill demands "a comprehensive strategy to counter terrorists' and terrorist organizations' use of social media."