Month: April 2016

Poorly maintained equipment, as shown in a union complaint about Verizon maintenance. (credit: Communications Workers of America)

Verizon says its network has suffered 57 incidents of vandalism in seven states in the two weeks since 36,000 workers went on strike. The "incidents of sabotage," mostly involving the severing of fiber optic cables or damage to terminal boxes, "have cut off thousands of Verizon customers from critical wireline services," the company said Wednesday.

Under normal conditions, there are only about a half-dozen incidents of sabotage over the course of a year, a Verizon spokesperson told Ars today. Verizon says it is still investigating the incidents and hasn't pinned the blame on anyone specific. But the company's announcement pointed out that "these malicious actions take place as Verizon is experiencing a strike."

Verizon reported similar incidents of vandalism during another strike in 2011.

Google's OnHub router just got a major new feature: IFTTT support. The demoed features let you do things like lock your doors when your device disconnects from the router or send an e-mail when someone connects to your wireless network. There are a few example recipes on this IFTTT page, or you can make your own using any of the channels supported on IFTTT.

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a service that lets you connect apps to other apps or connect apps to smart home devices. Developers for apps and services can build "If" triggers and "Do" actions that plug into the site. Users can make a "recipe" by combining these triggers and actions into a useful program, using the format "If [something happens], do [this action]."

Say you want to automatically tweet out a link every time an article on a website is posted. You can grab the RSS trigger function, so now you have "if a new item on this RSS feed appears, then [do this action]." Then you can combine it with the Twitter action and make "if a new item on this RSS feed appears, then tweet it out." Each trigger and action has its own configuration options, so you can do necessary plumbing like giving the "RSS action" the exact RSS feed it needs and giving the Twitter bot your login credentials so it can post from your account.

An artist's conception of Cassini, which carries a dust analysis system. (credit: NASA)

The composition of the dust between stars in our galaxy provides a window into some of the material that went into forming our Solar System. The local dust left behind from this process has been through many shake-ups in its history that have changed its composition; interstellar dust should be relatively pristine. For a long time, however, our efforts to understand interstellar dust have relied largely on inferences, as it’s difficult to directly observe the dim, diffuse material using telescopes.

Luckily, there is a way to get a direct measurement. There’s a cloud of interstellar dust near our Solar System, known as the Local Interstellar Cloud (LIC, sometimes called the “Local Fluff”). Some of it is streaming into our Solar System. This stream of LIC material was first observed by the Ulysses spacecraft in 1993, and grains of dust were captured by the Stardust spacecraft in the early 2000s and analyzed by a citizen science project.

The inward dust flow also passes by Saturn, where NASA happens to have a spacecraft with a dust collection system. This is Cassini, which was outfitted with that capability with the intention of capturing dust native to Saturn's rings. It just happened to be in the right place with the right tools to catch some interstellar dust.

Nerdy cousins Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) and Rell (Jordan Peele) try to act like gangbangers to rescue Keanu, the preternaturally adorable kitten. (credit: Warner Bros.)

There's a whole subgenre of nerd comedy out there like Big Bang Theory that's about laughing at nerds, poking fun at them for being on the spectrum, asexual, or both. But now, thanks to comedians like Key & Peele, John Oliver, and writer/director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead), there is another kind of nerd comedy—a great kind, where we laugh with the nerds, and those nerds have personalities that go beyond stale stereotypes. Key & Peele's first feature film, Keanu, is a perfect example of this kind of comedy. It's not perfect, but it will crack you up just like a good Internet meme does.

Though the sketch comedy show Key & Peele airs on Comedy Central, it found an audience on YouTube. There, clips from the show racked up millions of views and popularized the comedians' sharp blend of dork pop culture references and satirical takes on racial weirdness in America. Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are both biracial, and their resulting insider/outsider experiences are often fodder for their sketches—and fuel many of the jokes in Keanu, too. The premise of the movie, like a lot of the bits on their show, is that they're two geeky, middle-class guys who talk like white people (or, as Key says to Peele in Keanu, "You sound like John Ritter all the time.") And this can get awkward for all kinds of reasons.

In Keanu, the problem is that movie-loving stoner Rell (Peele) must drag his wonky cousin Clarence (Key) into an LA gang war to rescue his kitten (the eponymous Keanu). Turns out that all the people who couldn't make it into the Crips and the Bloods have formed a new gang, the Blips. And their leader, Cheddar, has kidnapped Keanu. Why? It's a long shaggy-dog fluffy-kitten story that involves turf wars, two scary gang ninjas from Allentown, and a new kind of super-drug called Holy Shit. To get the kitten back, Rell and Clarence infiltrate the Blips by pretending to be gangsters, dropping N-bombs and doing their best to act ghetto in chinos and pastel shirts.

(credit: Comcast)

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler is a fan of Comcast's plan to bring its TV service to customers without traditional set-top boxes. Comcast putting set-top box functionality into Samsung smart TVs and Roku devices without charging a monthly set-top box fee "points the way forward" and proves that industry complaints about proposed FCC rules are misguided, Wheeler said in a press conference after yesterday's FCC meeting.

In February, the FCC took a preliminary vote on rules requiring pay-TV companies to make their content and programming information available to makers of third-party hardware or applications. Cable companies blasted the FCC proposal, but last week Comcast launched a program to make its TV service available on other set-top boxes.

"I think that what Comcast just did is proving our point that you can take a third-party device, put set-top box functionality into it, and protect copyright, protect the economic ecosystem, not have to rebuild the network, and all these other horrible things that the industry has [claimed would happen]," Wheeler said yesterday. "That is the essence of our proposal, that you can safely move content to a third-party device."