Month: April 2016

The website of Total Call Mobile, which is accused of defrauding the Lifeline program. (credit: Total Call Mobile)

The Federal Communications Commission is planning to collect a $51.1 million fine from a phone company accused of using “widespread enrollment fraud” to collect improper payments from a program designed to help poor people.

Since 2014, Total Call Mobile (TCM) has requested and received $9.7 million in payments by signing up tens of thousands of duplicate or ineligible consumers “despite repeated and explicit warnings from its own employees, in some cases compliance specialists, that company sales agents were engaged in widespread enrollment fraud,” the FCC said in an announcement yesterday.

The alleged fraud targeted the Lifeline program, which provides discounted phone service to people with low incomes. Lifeline, part of the Universal Service Fund, is paid for by US residents through surcharges on phone bills.

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(credit: Kārlis Dambrāns)

The Justice Department told a federal judge Friday that it would continue to pursue a court order demanding Apple extract data from a seized iPhone at the center of a New York drug probe.

The move comes weeks after the government withdrew a similar request in an unrelated terror investigation in the Southern California county of San Bernardino. Authorities abandoned their San Bernardino intentions after the feds informed the magistrate presiding over the case that the FBI no longer needed Apple's assistance in unlocking the 5C model because it had done so with the help of an "outside" party. However, it became increasingly clear two days ago that authorities would likely forge ahead with this bid in the New York case after James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said the workaround purchased in the San Bernardino case was exclusive to the 5C and not other models like the 5S involved in this New York drug probe.

"The government’s application is not moot, and the government continues to require Apple’s assistance in accessing the data that it is authorized to search by warrant," the Justice Department wrote (PDF) in a letter to the federal judge presiding over the case.

Engineers test the RL-10 engine in NASA Lewis (now Glenn) Research Center's Propulsion Systems Laboratory. (credit: NASA)

NASA is making good progress on developing the core stage of its Space Launch System rocket, as directed by Congress in 2010. Per the request of legislators, the agency is using legacy hardware such as the space shuttle's main engines to propel this core stage and solid rocket boosters to give it an initial kick off the launch pad.

Meanwhile, the agency hasn't yet settled on an architecture for the upper stage of the massive rocket, which is used to boost payloads beyond low-Earth orbit and into deep space. For at least the first, uncrewed flight in 2018, NASA will use an interim upper stage. But Congress has been pressing the agency to settle on a new, permanent upper stage, dubbed the "Exploration Upper Stage," in time for the second launch of the SLS rocket in 2022 or 2023.

According to an insider website, NASASpaceflight.com, the agency had been considering nine proposals for the upper stage, but it has now chosen an architecture that uses four RL-10 engines as it moves forward. The RL-10 engine, a workhorse developed in the late 1950s and first flown in 1963, runs on liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen fuel.