Month: June 2017

Enlarge (credit: Arizona Cardinals)

In 2013, Megan Welter had a really bad night.

Welter, at that time a cheerleader for the Arizona Cardinals, got into a drunken fight with her boyfriend. It ended with her calling 911 and reporting him for domestic violence. Welter's boyfriend was a professional fighter, who "smashed [her] head into the tile" and put her in a "choke hold with his legs," she told the 911 dispatcher.

When the police showed up, they found out that wasn't true. Welter's boyfriend, Ryan McMahon, showed video on his cell phone verifying that it was Welter who had attacked him. She was arrested and charged with assault.

Enlarge / Pills. (credit: Getty | smartstock)

An Oklahoma doctor is facing five counts of second-degree murder charges following the opioid overdose deaths of her patients.

Prosecutors charged osteopathic physician Regan Ganoung Nichols, 57, on Friday in Oklahoma County District Court. Oklahoma Attorney General Mike Hunter told reporters that Nichols prescribed trusting patients a “horrifyingly excessive” amount of opioid medications. “Nichols’ blatant disregard for the lives of her patients is unconscionable,” he said.

In all, Nichols allegedly prescribed more than 1,800 medically unnecessary opioid pills to the patients who died, according to a probable cause affidavit reported by the Associated Press. Three out of the five patients also received allegedly deadly combinations of painkillers, muscle relaxants, and anti-anxiety medications.

Greetings, Arsians! Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains, we're back with new deals to share. Now you can get an Amazon Echo for one of the best prices we've seen: just $130. This is Amazon's original Alexa-enabled smart speaker, so it's a great device to get while at this discounted price. It may also come in handy during Amazon's annual Prime Day—a day when the company discounts a bunch of products—if there are Alexa-specific deals. Prime Day 2017 is slated to be sometime in July.

Check out the rest of the latest deals below.

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Enlarge (credit: Scott K. Johnson)

CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts—Some critics of the Paris Agreement on climate change probably think they could have done a better job with the agreement's details. Recently, a group of people taking a system dynamics course at MIT’s Sloan School of Management got the chance to take a whack at it.

Ars dropped in on a mock climate negotiation exercise run by MIT’s John Sterman, University of North Carolina’s Andrew Jones, and University of Massachusetts Lowell’s Juliette Rooney-Varga—the first time they’ve done one of these since President Trump announced his intent to pull the US out of the Paris Agreement. The simulated negotiation was informed by a display at the front of the room that showed the impact of the participants' pledged emissions reductions on climate change. In this case, the scoreboard was the same simple climate model that was used to facilitate the international negotiations in Copenhagen and Paris.

That model was developed in the late 1990s to simulate economic interactions with energy use and climate change, but it was adapted into a tool negotiators could use to quickly calculate the impacts of proposals. John Holdren—President Obama’s top science advisor—was keen on the model and ran it on his laptop during the negotiations that led to a bilateral agreement with China in 2014. And just before the Paris talks kicked off, top UN climate officials were running every what-if they could think of through the Climate Interactive model.

(credit: Alan Stanton)

The Internet of Things' "security through obscurity" has been proven once again to not be terribly secure thanks to an angry and possibly inebriated ex-employee. Adam Flanagan, a former radio frequency engineer for a company that manufactures remote meter reading equipment for utilities, was convicted on June 15 in Philadelphia after pleading guilty to two counts of "unauthorized access to a protected computer and thereby recklessly causing damage." Flanagan admitted that after being fired by his employer, he used information about systems he had worked on to disable meter reading equipment at several water utilities. In at least one case, Flanagan also changed the default password to an obscenity.

Flanagan's employer was not named in court documents. According to a plea agreement filing, Flanagan worked on a team that installed tower gateway base stations (TGBs)—communications hubs mounted on poles distributed across a utility's service area to communicate with smart meters. His work was apparently not up to his former employer's standards, however. In March of 2013, he received a poor annual performance review and was placed on a "performance improvement plan." He failed to meet expectations and was terminated in November of 2013.

Over the next few months, TGBs that Flanagan's employer had installed for a number of municipal water departments "developed problems," the Justice Department's sentencing memo stated. In December of 2013, employees of the water authority in Kennebec, Maine, found they couldn't connect to the utility's TGBs. This was a system Flanagan had installed, but the problems could not be directly attributed to him because the logs for the system weren't checked until February of 2014. By then, data from December had already been purged.

Enlarge / The FCC was asked to decide whether this ringless voicemail technology should be subject to anti-robocall rules. (credit: Stratics Networks)

A petition to exempt ringless voicemails from anti-robocall rules has been withdrawn after heavy opposition.

In March, a marketing company called All About the Message petitioned the Federal Communications Commission for a ruling that would prevent anti-robocall rules from applying to ringless voicemails. But the company withdrew its petition without explanation in a letter to the FCC last week, even though the commission hadn't yet ruled on the matter.

As the name suggests, a ringless voicemail is the delivery of a voice message to a voicemail box without ringing the recipient's phone. The now-withdrawn petition asked the FCC to declare that this type of message does not count as a "call" under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), which prohibits non-emergency calls made with auto-dialers, artificial voices, or prerecorded voices without the "prior express consent of the called party."