Month: May 2016

On May 20, the US Navy took delivery of the USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000), the first of a class of destroyers designed to take on the role once served by battleships. As the Navy prepares to commission the $22 billion Zumwalt, the service is accelerating its plans to produce 14 smaller ships—frigates that were ordered to be built by the Pentagon instead of the last set of the Navy's Littoral Combat Ships.

The LCS program has experienced a number of glitches over its lifetime—canceled weapons systems, mine-hunting systems that can't pass acceptance tests, failures of gears aboard two ships that left them stranded, and the realization that no one asked for hull corrosion protection on one variant.

The biggest problem the LCS faces, however, is that its capabilities that do work match up against a very specific class of adversary: something on the level of 1990s-era Iranian Revolutionary Guard Navy patrol boats and suicide speedboats. And with the rise of China's blue-water navy and the growing tensions over claims in the South China Sea, the LCS is facing missions where the threat will be beyond its current capabilities.

While brevity is oft considered the soul of wit, Twitter has finally come through on the rumored character limit increase.

On Tuesday, Twitter formally announced that @-replies and media attachments (you know, those GIFs that the kids are crazy about these days) will no longer count against the 140-character limit. The San Francisco company also announced that users will soon be able to retweet and quote their own tweets. Links aside from those to other tweets will still count against the character limit, however.

“We’ll be enabling the Retweet button on your own Tweets, so you can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet yourself when you want to share a new reflection or feel like a really good one went unnoticed,” Todd Sherman, a senior product manager, wrote in the blog post.

Kelly Hoggan, the embattled head of security for the Transportation Security Administration, has been stripped of his duties, the House Oversight Committee announced Monday evening. The move comes nearly two weeks after a contentious committee hearing and as lawmakers learned that Hoggan had received $90,000 in bonuses despite security snafus and long lines at US airports.

TSA administrator Peter Neffenger said, "These adjustments will enable more focused leadership and screening operations at critical airports in the national transportation system."

As passengers have been confronted by massive security lines at US airports, lawmakers found Hoggan had been awarded the bonus despite a Department of Homeland Security Inspector General report highlighting “pitiful” security operations. The bonus was paid out in roughly $10,000 increments, prompting accusations of “smurfing.”

A well-known First Amendment lawyer has formally responded on behalf of a city council candidate in Mesa, Arizona, who is accused of abusing the city’s trademarked logo in his campaign literature.

In his Monday response letter, lawyer Paul Alan Levy informs the City of Mesa’s lawyer that “not every use of a trademark constitutes infringement, and the First Amendment protects Whittaker’s use of these logos for purposes of noncommercial political expression.” Levy represents political hopeful Jeremy Whittaker.

The dispute represents yet another seemingly overzealous attempt at restricting speech using intellectual property laws. Levy has proven successful at halting such cases: earlier this year he defended an anonymous YouTube user whose identity was attempted to be revealed by the rogue Georgia dentist who was the subject of this user’s video.

AT&T's home Internet data caps got an overhaul yesterday when the company implemented a recently announced plan to strictly enforce the caps and collect overage fees from more customers. Customers stuck on AT&T's older DSL architecture will be facing lower caps and potentially higher overage fees than customers with more modern Internet service.

AT&T put a positive spin on the changes when it announced them in March, saying that it was increasing the monthly data limits imposed on most home Internet customers. This was technically true as AT&T already had caps for most Internet users. But previously, the caps were only enforced in DSL areas, so the limits had no financial impact on most customers. Now, a huge swath of AT&T customers have effectively gone from unlimited plans to ones that are capped, with an extra $10 charge for each additional 50GB of data provided per month.

The only customers who aren't getting an increase in their monthly data allowance are the ones who have been dealing with caps the past few years, according to AT&T's data usage website:

Google’s Paris offices have been raided by hundreds of French investigators—the search giant is suspected of avoiding tax in the country to the tune of €1.6 billion (~$1.78 billion, £1.22 billion).

The French financial prosecutor’s office (Le parquet national financier, PNF) which carried out the raid in the early hours of Tuesday morning, confirmed that the searches were the result of a preliminary investigation opened in June last year into possible “aggravated tax fraud and organised money laundering.”

Google’s European headquarters are based in Ireland, which boasts a tiny 12.5 percent corporation tax—the lowest in the European Union.