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An optical fiber cable. (credit: Srleffler)

Verizon has reportedly switched 1.1 million customers from copper to fiber lines over the past few years under a program it calls "Fiber Is the Only Fix." But some phone customers have refused the switch to fiber because they prefer to keep their copper lines—even though Verizon apparently is refusing to fix problems in the copper infrastructure.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that it obtained internal company documents that describe the effort to switch problematic copper lines to fiber. Verizon customers with copper-based landline phones who call for repairs twice in 18 months "will be told that their 'only fix' is to replace decades-old copper line with high-speed fiber as Verizon won't fix the copper," the report said.

While Verizon still has a few million copper-line customers, the Fiber Is the Only Fix policy is responsible for 1.1 million changes to fiber in Pennsylvania and other states. The policy is also in place in New York, Massachusetts, Virginia, and Delaware, and it's expected to expand to New Jersey, the report said.

The San Antonio Independent School District's superintendent said that 27-year-old district officer Joshua Kehm's use of force at Rhodes Middle School on March 29 was "absolutely unwarranted."

"Additionally, the officer’s report was inconsistent with the video and it was also delayed," Pedro Martinez, the district's superintendent, continued in a statement. He added, "We want to be clear that we will not tolerate this behavior." Martinez said that the officer did not note the violence in his report. The school district has referred the investigation "to a third-party law enforcement agency."

SpaceX

SpaceX flew its Falcon 9 rocket into space on Friday and then landed it on a drone ship. Here's what that looked like from on board.

14 more images in gallery

On Friday, the Falcon 9 rocket soared into space and launched its cargo toward the International Space Station. And then for the first time in history, the rocket fired its engines to slow its horizontal velocity and make a guided descent back toward an ocean-based platform where it landed—without toppling over.

After the autonomous drone ship made its return to Port Canaveral early on Tuesday morning, SpaceX collected images from the on-board cameras and released them. They show the dramatic landing up close and in your face.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk said this rocket and its nine engines will be tested 10 times to ensure that everything functions properly. And if that's the case, this rocket could be launched into space as early as June. Luxembourg-based satellite company SES has already indicated that it would be willing to fly on a reused rocket.

"From the headquarters which will get expired in next 24 working hours." (credit: Ray Tsang)

As if political campaigns, shady telemarketers hawking home security systems, and the rest of the usual suspects aren't generating enough automated phone calls, three separate groups have used April tax paranoia to fuel fraudulent robocalls claiming to be affiliated with the Internal Revenue Service. Using calls masked by US phone numbers, these fraud campaigns seek to get anxious taxpayers to fall for their schemes by claiming to be directly from the IRS or from organizations seeking to collect on the IRS' behalf. The scams hit millions of phone numbers over the past few weeks.

Thanks to voice-over-IP technologies and cheap robocall systems, fly-by-night telemarketing operators are able to flaunt "Do Not Call" list laws and saturate blocks of numbers with calls that push products both real and fake. Ars hunted down one scam last year that used an outbound voice response system that attempted to convince call recipients that they were talking to an actual person, funneling them toward a fake magazine sweepstakes scam.

The Federal Trade Commission has been searching for technology to help fight robocalls for years. There have been some promising technologies developed to help fight them, such as Robokiller—a cloud service that won last year's FTC "Robocalls: Humanity Strikes Back" contest—but those technologies have thus far failed to materialize in a form that can help the average consumer. Robokiller's development went on hiatus late last year as the team behind it was pulled into other projects.

(credit: Jeremy Brooks)

With a deluge of DNA sequences pouring in from various studies, researchers diving in are finding that Mendelian genetics may be a lot muddier than expected. Wrinkled peas aside, certain bad mutations may not always be bad.

After sifting through the genetic codes of nearly 600,000 adults, researchers discovered that 13 of them were healthy despite carrying mutations that were thought to guarantee devastating childhood disorders, such as cystic fibrosis and those that cause severe skeletal malformations. The authors, led by Stephen Friend of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, hypothesize that these 13 apparently normal adults have other genetic elements that compensate or buffer the effects of those mutations. If that’s true and researchers can pinpoint the source of their genetic resilience, the findings may offer critical information about how to cure these diseases in the not so genetically lucky, the authors report in Nature Biotechnology.

Most research in the past has focused on finding the cause of a disease, Friend said in a teleconference with media. But, he added, “finding the gene that is causing the disease is not the same as trying to find a way to prevent those symptoms.” A few years ago, he and a colleague came up with the idea of looking for cures not in the sick, but in people who should have gotten sick—people who look healthy and normal.