Month: October 2016

Enlarge (credit: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)

The embattled CEO of Backpage.com, Carl Ferrer, was arrested Thursday and accused of running an online ad portal that facilitated prostitution and the pimping of young children into sexual servitude.

Carl Ferrer (credit: Carl Ferrer)

"Raking in millions of dollars from the trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable victims is outrageous, despicable, and illegal, California Attorney General Kamala Harris said. "Backpage and its executives purposefully and unlawfully designed Backpage to be the world’s top online brothel."

Charged with a variety of felonies, (PDF) including pimping a minor, pimping and conspiracy to commit pimping, is Carl Ferrer. The 55-year-old Ferrer has been in a year-long battle with the US Senate, which voted to hold him in contempt for his refusal to comply with an investigation into online sex trafficking. He had claimed the Web portal enjoyed a First Amendment right not to supply documents to the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations about how it reviews third-party ads posted to the site. After his legal challenge ping-ponged through the courts, the US Supreme Court last month approved the subpoena, forcing Ferrer to comply.

Enlarge / A Comcast data cap notification. (credit: Comcast)

Comcast is bringing data caps to a bunch of new cities beginning November 1, roughly doubling the number of markets where it imposes data limits and overage fees. As before, customers will be allowed to use 1TB of data per month before being hit with overage charges of $10 for each additional 50GB. For an extra $50 per month, customers can purchase unlimited data.

Prior to the expansion, Comcast said it was enforcing data caps in 14 percent of the markets in its 39-state territory. Instead of immediately imposing caps nationwide, Comcast has been steadily rolling them out to new markets since 2012, usually adding a few at a time and gauging customer feedback before expanding to more. The caps were originally 300GB a month, but as more customers started exceeding them, they were boosted to 1TB (downloads and uploads combined) this year. Comcast says more than 99 percent of its customers use less than a terabyte of data.

Markets in 18 states will face data caps and overage fees for the first time, though other markets in some of these states were already capped.

Enlarge / Does this really look like good drone flying weather? (credit: NASA)

The Federal Aviation Administration and the Academy of Model Aeronautics have issued a joint statement warning drone operators to not fly in the vicinity of Hurricane Matthew rescue and recovery operations by first responders.

"Any unauthorized drone or model aircraft operations that interfere with disaster relief efforts are subject to civil penalties of up to $32,140 per violation and possible criminal prosecution," the AMA noted in a release published today. While the FAA has not yet issued any temporary flight restrictions in Florida or other areas affected thus far by Hurricane Matthew, nearly all of the population centers on Florida's east coast (and much of the coasts of Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina) are already covered by "notification required" restrictions for drones because of nearby airports, helipads, and national parks.

The FAA has also issued a notice classifying the location of any "special sporting event"—including Major League Baseball playoff games, NFL and NCAA football games, or any other sporting event at a location with a seating capacity of over 30,000 people as "National Defense Airspace," banning all flights (and other airborne activity) within three nautical miles. These areas are much smaller than the flight restrictions posted for this year's Super Bowl in San Jose, which was given a 32 nautical mile radius no-fly zone—covering practically all of the San Francisco Bay area.

An artist's depiction of the canoes used by the Polynesians of the Hawaiian islands. (credit: Hawaii.edu)

The Polynesian exploration of sparse islands of the Pacific will remain humanity's greatest migration until we head for other planets. And it clearly wasn't just a one-way trip; evidence indicates that trade networks covering thousands of kilometers were maintained for centuries. Now, a new study of ancient Polynesian DNA has indicated that it wasn't just trade goods that were exchanged. DNA from at least two different sources ended up spreading through the population of Polynesia before European contact.

The study also suggests that our understanding of how history produced the genetics of modern Polynesians was completely off-base.

That understanding was built by looking at the DNA of modern Polynesians and comparing it with the genetics of other peoples around the Pacific. This indicated that modern Polynesians have a mixed ancestry, with the majority of their genomes coming from an East Asian population. An additional contribution, however, came from the Papuans that inhabit the islands north of Australia.