Month: November 2017

Enlarge / Net neutrality supporters march past the FCC headquarters before a commission meeting on May 15, 2014. (credit: Getty Images | The Washington Post)

The Obama administration's network neutrality rules are in danger, and the activists who helped get those regulations enacted aren't giving up without a fight. They're planning a series of protests nationwide to pressure the Federal Communications Commission to reject Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to roll back network neutrality protections.

The protests will be held outside Verizon stores on December 7, a week before an expected December 14 vote on Pai's proposal. They chose Verizon because Verizon has been a leading opponent of the net neutrality rules and because Pai worked as Verizon's associate general counsel from 2001 to 2003.

"The company has been spending millions on lobbying and lawsuits to kill net neutrality so they can gouge us all for more money," the protest organizers write. "We’re calling on our lawmakers to do their job overseeing the FCC and speak out against Ajit Pai’s plan to gut Title II net neutrality protections."

Enlarge / Not creepy at all.

Thirty years ago today, a person or persons unknown briefly hijacked the signal of two Chicago television stations, broadcasting a bizarre taped message from a man wearing a Max Headroom mask. The "broadcast intrusion" interrupted a primetime news broadcast from Chicago's WGN, and then (more successfully) the 11:00pm broadcast of Dr. Who on the Chicago public television station WTTW. To this day, the perpetrators of the television hack remain unknown.

The hack was made possible by the analog television broadcast technology of the day—the attacker was able to overpower the signals sent by the television studios to a broadcast antenna atop the John Hancock building in Chicago with his or her own signals. In the case of the WGN news broadcast, engineers were able to change the frequency used in the uplink to the John Hancock tower after a brief interruption, and the audio from the pirate transmission was drowned in static. But the WTTW takeover lasted a full 90 seconds, and the pirate TV broadcast's audio, while distorted, was audible to anyone who happened to be tuned in.

Broadcast intrusions were not rare in the 1980s. The first major one took place in 1977, when someone interrupted the audio of an ITV Southern Television broadcast from a tower in Hannington, England, with a message purported to be from an alien representative of an "Intergalactic Association." The message warned, "All your weapons of evil must be removed… You have but a short time to learn to live together in peace."

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Nicholas Rigg)

New York's attorney general has been trying to investigate fraud in public comments on the Federal Communications Commission's anti-net neutrality plan but alleges that the FCC has refused to cooperate with the investigation.

NY State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman says that "hundreds of thousands of Americans" were likely impersonated in fake comments on the net neutrality docket. But FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's office would not provide information needed for New York's investigation, Schneiderman wrote yesterday in an open letter to Pai:

 [T]he process the FCC has employed to consider potentially sweeping alterations to current net neutrality rules has been corrupted by the fraudulent use of Americans' identities — and the FCC has been unwilling to assist my office in our efforts to investigate this unlawful activity.

Specifically, for six months my office has been investigating who perpetrated a massive scheme to corrupt the FCC's notice and comment process through the misuse of enormous numbers of real New Yorkers' and other Americans' identities. Such conduct likely violates state law—yet the FCC has refused multiple requests for crucial evidence in its sole possession that is vital to permit that law enforcement investigation to proceed.

The FCC received 22 million comments on its plan to repeal net neutrality rules and deregulate broadband providers, but many were fraudulent. In May, some of the people who were impersonated by anti-net neutrality spammers asked the Federal Communications Commission to notify other victims of the impersonation and remove fraudulent comments from the net neutrality docket.

Enlarge / An adult Clonorchis sinensis. (credit: PLoS Medicine)

A small pilot study hints that a startling number of Vietnam veterans may be infected with a liver parasite that can induce a rare type of cancer, the Associated Press reports.

The study, conducted by the Northport VA Medical Center in New York, involved blood samples from 50 Vietnam veterans. Testing performed at Seoul National University in South Korea found that more than 20 percent of those samples were positive or borderline positive for antibodies against the parasite, a liver fluke.

The results are preliminary and require follow-up research. It’s also unclear how the 50 blood samples were chosen. That said, the results hint that many veterans may have the cancer-inducing infection and not yet know. The study follows a report last year by the AP, which raised questions about the rate of that otherwise rare type of cancer in veterans.

Enlarge / An illustration of a New Horizons spacecraft atop an illustration of 'Oumuamua. Nothing is to scale. (credit: European Southern Observatory / M. Kornmesser )

A little more than a month ago, an interstellar visitor now known as 'Oumuamua passed within 24 million kilometers of Earth. It is now moving rapidly away from our planet at a velocity of approximately 26km/s. That is considerably faster than, say, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is hurtling beyond the Solar System at a velocity of 17km/s.

The first interstellar object is doubly intriguing because humans have never been able to study something from beyond the Solar System up close. Moreover, recent observations have shown that 'Oumuamua has a reddish color, astronomers say, and unexpected oblong shape, like that of a giant, 400-meter-long cigar. Already, the object is fading from view, and we will never see it again as it zooms away.

But what if we could? NASA is building what will be the world's most powerful rocket, the Space Launch System. Would it be capable of launching a small probe to catch 'Oumuamua? Do we have any technology that can catch this interstellar interloper?