Month: September 2017

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | designer491)

The Federal Communications Commission has ignored a public records request for information that might shed light on the legitimacy of comments on Chairman Ajit Pai's anti-net neutrality plan, according to a lawsuit filed against the FCC.

Freelance writer Jason Prechtel filed a Freedom of Information Act (FoIA) request on June 4 asking the FCC for data related to bulk comment uploads, which may contain comments falsely attributed to people without their knowledge. But while the FCC acknowledged receiving his FoIA request, it did not approve or deny the request within the legally allotted timeframe, Prechtel wrote in a lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia.

"As the agency is legally obliged to respond to my request, and as the underlying questions behind my request still haven’t been answered, I have filed a lawsuit against the FCC for [its] refusal to conduct a reasonably timely search for the records, and have demanded the release of these records," Prechtel wrote in a blog post describing his court complaint on Friday. "Even now, over three months after my FOIA request, and even after I’ve filed a lawsuit, this request is still listed as 'under agency review.'"

Enlarge / It's now apparent there's no technical reason why Fortnite players on Xbox One and PS4 can't play together. (credit: Epic Games)

People playing Epic's Fortnite on consoles recently were surprised to discover a new feature had been quietly added to the game: the ability to play with gamers on other consoles.

Over the weekend, a number of Reddit users posted evidence of players from other consoles showing up in their Fortnite games, including a father/son combo playing on two different consoles in the same room.

The cross-console connection became apparent because of a little-known naming convention between the two consoles: Microsoft's Xbox Live allows players to use spaces in their online handle, while Sony's PlayStation Network does not. Thus, when PS4 players noticed random opponents in their matches with handles that included spaces, they knew something odd was going on.

Enlarge / Alaska, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, ANWR, Brooks Range across Coastal Plain. (Photo by: Education Images/UIG via Getty Images) (credit: Getty Images)

The US Department of the Interior (DOI) is moving to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, which could reverse 30 years of conservation efforts in the far north of the 49th state. According to a document obtained by the Washington Post that was written in mid-August, the DOI requested that the US Fish and Wildlife Service update a 1980s provision to allow new seismic exploration in the Alaska refuge.

The efforts to conduct new studies of the oil and gas under the refuge’s coastal plain are still in preliminary stages—the DOI’s draft rule allowing seismic imaging study would be subject to a public comment period and would certainly face lawsuits from environmental groups if approved. Even then, exploration efforts wouldn’t automatically trigger well-drilling in the area—extraction in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge requires the approval of Congress as well as a market environment favorable to drilling in the remote and challenging tundra region.

Currently, oil is trading for around $50 a barrel, and the price isn’t expected to rebound quickly with a glut of supply in the world oil market. Without a clear way to profit off that oil, expensive tundra drilling operations are less economically attractive compared to easier-to-tap oil fields around the world.

Enlarge (credit: Waymo / Aurich)

Self-driving cars have Silicon Valley salivating. Something of a gold rush is going on right now, as everyone is trying to perfect the technology that could banish gridlock and traffic casualties once and for all. Google started working on the problem back in 2009, then in 2016 spun the project out as a company in its own right called Waymo. Today, we learned something new about the Waymo project: it's powered by Intel.

The chip-maker publicly stated today that it has been partnering with Waymo since 2009. Intel has been supplying Xeon processors, Arria field programmable gate arrays (for machine vision), and gigabit ethernet solutions (to let all the various components talk to each other).

"With three million miles of real-world driving, Waymo cars with Intel technology inside have already processed more self-driving car miles than any other autonomous fleet on US roads," wrote Intel CEO Brian Krzanich in a blog post announcing the news.

Enlarge / Former Soviet Colonel Stanislav Petrov sits at home on March 19, 2004 in Moscow. Petrov was in charge of Soviet nuclear early warning systems on the night of September 26, 1983, and decided not to retaliate when a false "missile attack" signal appeared to show a US nuclear launch. He is feted by nuclear activists as the man who "saved the world" by determining that the Soviet system had been spoofed by a reflection off the Earth. (credit: Scott Peterson/Getty Images)

Former Soviet Air Defense Colonel Stanislav Petrov, the man known for preventing an accidental nuclear launch by the Soviet Union at the height of Cold War tensions, has passed away. Karl Schumacher, a German political activist who first met Petrov in 1998 and helped him visit Germany a year later, published news of Petrov's death after learning from Petrov's son that he had died in May. Petrov was 77.

Petrov's story has since been recounted several times by historians, including briefly in William Taubman's recent biography of former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, Gorbachev: His Life and Times. Ars also wrote about Petrov in our 2015 feature on Exercise Able Archer. On the night of September 26, 1983, Petrov was watch officer in charge of the Soviet Union's recently completed US-KS nuclear launch warning satellite network, known as "Oko" (Russian for "eye"). To provide instant warning of an American nuclear attack, the system was supposed to catch the flare of launching missiles as they rose.

That night, just past midnight, the Oko system signaled that a single US missile had been launched. "When I first saw the alert message, I got up from my chair," Petrov told RT in a 2010 interview. "All my subordinates were confused, so I started shouting orders at them to avoid panic. I knew my decision would have a lot of consequences."

Enlarge / See a pause? No? Neither does basic statistics. (credit: NOAA)

Early this year, a British tabloid ran a hyperbolic article on climate change, claiming that world leaders had been "duped" by climate data that had been manipulated. It wasn't unusual for the outlet or the article's author to make badly misleading claims about climate research, and our own investigation into the underlying disagreement showed that the piece actually boiled down to a dispute about how best to archive data. These sorts of misrepresentations happen dozens of times a year.

But something unusual did eventually happen as a response to the article in the Mail on Sunday: a UK press watchdog determined that the article breeched the Editor's Code of Conduct. Mail on Sunday was subsequently ordered to prominently display the inaccuracies above the article itself.

IPSO facto

The judgement was handed down by IPSO, the UK's Independent Press Standards Organization (IPSO). It maintains an Editor's Code of Conduct, which sets standards for handling a variety of issues; the one relevant here is the section on accuracy. The Mail on Sunday belongs to IPSO and agrees to be bound by its rulings.