Month: February 2018

Enlarge / A view of the Falcon Heavy rocket on Monday, from one-quarter of a mile away. (credit: Trevor Mahlmann for Ars Technica)

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLORIDA—Today may finally be the day. After nearly a decade of development, the Falcon Heavy has finally reached the launch pad and undergone all of its preflight tests. All that remains is to fuel the three boosters and light 27 engines.

Weather at the launch site is fine today, with mostly sunny skies and light winds. The official forecast calls for an 80 percent chance of favorable weather conditions at the time the three-hour launch window opens at 1:30pm ET.

Plenty of things can go bad with the maiden flight of a rocket, of course. That is especially true considering the Falcon Heavy's structure—three boosters strapped together. In an interview with Ars on Monday, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the company had tested as much as it could on the ground. But certain elements can only be tested in flight.

Enlarge / A website for a Chinese "Internet Navy" offering search engine optimization and other marketing services. These types of operations are being targeted by Chinese authorities for "illegal Internet speculation." (credit: Sina News)

While Facebook and Twitter have been fighting the scourge of organized efforts to use social media to misinform and use their platforms as part of "influence campaigns," China is battling its own Internet troll and "fake news" problem, according to a report from Liu Yi Zhan of China's Xinhua News Agency. But while Facebook and Twitter can only ban accounts, Chinese officials can throw those who participate in "illegal Internet speculation" in jail.

Since last May, more than 200 people in China have been arrested, and thousands of others have found themselves confronted by police. Social media accounts and "illegal" websites have been seized as part of a campaign against organizations literally called "wǎngluò shuǐjūn," or Network Navy (網絡水軍—literally, "network water army").These Internet sailors have plied the websites, forums, and social media services of China for the last decade, running public relations and marketing campaigns in support or in opposition to one entity or another. For the most part, these operations have been on behalf of Chinese companies trying to promote themselves—or make their competitors look bad.

Network navies are loose organizations of hundreds or thousands of people recruited through sites targeted at "leisure workers"—people seeking extra money by doing tasks similar to Mechanical Turk jobs in their spare time. The organizers of these groups have typically marketed the services of their workers to companies looking for "grassroots" marketing help—or, more accurately, fake grassroots ("astroturf") campaigns—on social media services such as WeChat, the Weibo micro-blogging site (China's answer to Twitter), Dianping (like Yelp), and RenRen (a Chinese Facebook clone). But according to officials at China's Ministry of Public Security, they have also engaged in the creation of spam email campaigns. fraudulent news sites, and social media trolling campaigns to shape public opinion and punish individuals who have run afoul of whomever pays them.

Enlarge (credit: Getty | Andrew Aitchison)

In August of 2016, doctors in Washoe County, Nevada, found that one of their patients couldn’t shake a bad bacterial infection. The infection had likely taken hold years before while the local woman was on an extended visit to India. There, she had undergone multiple hospitalizations and surgery for a leg injury and developed a bone infection. By the time she got back to Nevada, the infection had spread.

The US doctors isolated her in a hospital room and threw all the antibiotics they could at the infection. It resisted all of them—26 in total, tests confirmed. In early September, the woman developed septic shock and died.

Though rare, the case highlights two important points: that drug-resistant bacteria don’t stop at borders and that India is of particular concern in the fight against antibiotic-resistant infections. While cases of drug-resistant bacterial infections are rising globally, recent data shows that India has among the highest rates of such infections in the world. The country is also the largest consumer of antibiotics per capita.