Month: January 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuri_Arcurs)

New privacy rules that protect the Web browsing data of broadband subscribers went into effect just two weeks ago, but they could be overturned shortly after Republicans gain a majority at the Federal Communications Commission.

The FCC voted on the rules on October 27, and they took effect on January 3. Also on January 3, trade groups representing ISPs filed petitions asking the FCC to reconsider the rulemaking, said an FCC public notice issued today.

Normally, these petitions for reconsideration would be rejected by the FCC, and ISPs' next option would be to sue. But in this case, the privacy rules were passed 3-2, with three Democrats voting for the rules and two Republicans voting against them. Those two Republicans, Ajit Pai and Michael O'Rielly, will enjoy a 2-1 majority after President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration Friday because Democratic Chairman Tom Wheeler said he will resign, and Democratic Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel had to leave the FCC when the Republican-controlled Senate refused to reconfirm her for another term.

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Chelsea Manning, serving a 35-year term for leaking a cache of classified military documents to WikiLeaks, had her sentence commuted Tuesday by President Barack Obama. The president, with just days remaining in his presidency, said Manning can be freed on May 17 of this year instead of 2045.

The 29-year-old Army private was court-martialed in 2013 for forwarding a cache of classified documents to WikiLeaks. After being convicted of leaking more than 700,000 documents and video, Manning—then known as Bradley—announced that she is a transgender woman and would be going by the name Chelsea going forward.

Manning has been both reviled and lauded for her 2010 document dump and has been in prison longer than any other convicted US leaker. In a military first, Manning was approved in 2015 for hormone therapy as part of transition-related care, nearly a year after she made demands for such treatment.

Enlarge / Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanders past oblivious people in Samsung Gear VR headsets in a photo that is not from this trial. (credit: Facebook)

In what he said was his first time testifying in a courtroom, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was "highly confident that Oculus products are built on Oculus technology."

The testimony came during a trial in which ZeniMax Media, parent company of Bethesda Softworks and Id Software, alleges that Doom co-creator John Carmack stole trade secrets and destroyed evidence when he took VR technology developed as a ZeniMax employee over to Oculus when he became its Chief Technology Officer in 2013. Zuckerberg rebutted that idea flatly on the stand, saying, "the idea that Oculus products are based on someone else’s technology is just wrong" (as reported by The New York Times).

In his testimony, Zuckerberg hinted that ZeniMax was simply looking to latch on to Oculus' success in the wake of the company's $2 billion acquisition by Facebook in 2014. "It is pretty common when you announce a big deal or do something that all kinds of people just kind of come out of the woodwork and claim that they just own some portion of the deal," Zuckerberg said (as reported by The New York Times' Mike Isaac in this tweet). "Like most people in the court, I’ve never even heard of ZeniMax before. I know that our legal team would look into this and examine, but they aren’t going to take a lot of my time on something they don’t think is credible."

Enlarge (credit: Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

SkyPan International, a small aerial photography company that uses drones, settled a proposed fine on Tuesday over its alleged unauthorized drone flights over New York City and Chicago in 2012 and 2014.

To settle the issue and stave off a potential lawsuit by the Federal Aviation Administration, SkyPan has agreed to pay a $200,000 civil penalty and will also pay $150,000 if it violates related federal aviation rules and regulations within the next year. The company will also work with the FAA to publish three “public service announcements” within the next 12 months as a way to help drone operators comply with federal law.

Back in 2015, the FAA had proposed a fine of $1.9 million. According to the FAA’s allegations at the time, SkyPan International flew 65 "unauthorized operations" between March 2012 and December 2014. Of those, approximately two-thirds were in the New York Class B airspace, the highly congested areas over the city.

Enlarge / The Halley VI Research Station prior to relocation. (credit: British Antarctic Survey)

Running a research station in the extreme conditions of Antarctica comes with a long list of logistical challenges. Keeping people alive is obviously job one, but the buildings themselves need looking after, too—especially if you're trying to maintain a station on a floating ice shelf.

And a floating ice shelf is where the UK’s Halley Research Station has been since 1956, or rather, where all six incarnations of the Halley Research Station have been. In 2002, when the UK realized that Halley V was doomed to reach the dangerous end of the floating conveyor belt of ice soon, its researchers opted for a change from the series of simple, temporary structures they had built. Instead, they designed a set of portable buildings. Looking a bit like a giant cross between Lego bricks and a caterpillar, Halley VI is a series of buildings on stilts and skis that can be hauled around with a big enough tractor.

Soon after Halley VI was installed in its new home in 2012, a large crack in the ice shelf that had long been dormant started growing again. A few years of study led to the selection of a new site 23 kilometers away, which seven of the eight building modules have now been dragged to.

Enlarge / Android Police's mockup of the Google watches, which Blass says are accurate. (credit: Android Police)

Prolific leaker Evan Blass posted earlier today that Android Wear 2.0 is due out February 9, and now, over at VentureBeat, Blass claims Google's smartwatch will launch on the same date.

Google confirmed earlier that it would launch a pair of "flagship" smartwatches soon, and it said that while they weren't going to be "Pixel" branded, the devices would be a Nexus-style collaboration. Blass says that those watches are made by LG and are called the "LG Watch Sport" and "LG Watch Style."

Android Police has been tracking a Google smartwatch since July of last year, and Blass says that report—including a mockup produced by Android Police, pictured above—is still spot on. Blass says the larger "Sport" watch is 14.2mm thick and has a 1.38-inch, 480×480 circular P-OLED display, 768MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, a 420mAh battery, an IP68 ingress rating, and a heart rate sensor. There's also tons of connectivity; besides the standard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, it has 3G and LTE data, GPS, and NFC, presumably for Android Pay compatibility.

Enlarge / Like this, but much smaller, much slower, and far more toxic. (credit: Houston Texas)

All the cool kids are talking about dark energy and dark matter. Why? Because these are things that current physical models don't predict. The hope is that understanding one or both of these concepts will unveil a new world where everyone gets cookies and is born understanding physical concepts like tensors. OK, maybe not everyone will get a cookie.

But dark matter and energy are not the only things that current physical models don't predict. The Standard Model, which describes the behavior of fundamental particles and forces, has a number of physical constants. These constants are measured, and we know them accurately. But there is no theory that predicts why these constants have the values they do.

What can we do about this? One option is to measure these constants under as many different conditions as possible and test to see if they are, indeed, constant. The focus of this effort has mainly been on change with respect to time. Researchers compare astronomical measurements, made on very distant objects, to lab measurements. To within measurement uncertainty, the fundamental constants have not changed in the last few billion years.