FTC Slams Robo-dialing Scammers
FCC Rural Broadband In Trouble?
Tenable Slams MS for Unethical, Slow, and Lazy Handling of Security Concerns
X Tries to Shut Down Critics
Undersea Cables? What About Them?
Incandescent Bulb Ban
LK-99: Worth Getting Worked Up Over?

WE 1 – Remember Those Robo-Calls About Your Auto Warranty?
The tandem behind this scheme, Roy M. Cox and Aaron Michael Jones, orchestrated more than 5 billion calls to about 500 million phone numbers in the course of 3 months in 2021. That is about 643 calls per second, if it was exactly 90 days. Holy crap. I’m struggling to wrap my head around the sheer volume, here. Because this is not the first time they have been caught doing similar things, the FTC laid the smack down on them, to the tune of a $299,997,000 fine. I suppose with robocalling via VOIP, it is really only a matter of 1’s and 0’s and bandwidth. Even still, to have it “just work” for that long. I have to wonder what the investment was up front, in order to access the phone number database, and the servers to host the files for the robot system. They also masked their caller ID to encourage people to pick up. These clowns sound like they ran a pretty tight ship. Hats off. Shoot, I think my wife and I got something like a couple calls a day from these jokers. I wonder if we can get a piece of that fine action, once they pay it.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/pair-of-scammers-hit-with-fccs-biggest-robocalling-fine-300-million-dollars

WE 2 – ISPs Underbid Themselves To Get Contracts
The FCC’s Rural Digital Opportunity Fund looks to be in trouble after several of their ISP partners did not estimate their costs properly when they sought to drive their bids down to get the contracts for providing 100MBs broadband service to much of rural America. This would be HUGE, once completed. However, Biden-flation has hit all of us hard, and demand, on top of that, shot the construction and material costs for these new Fiber lines through the roof. They are complaining that they couldn’t possibly have foreseen that costs would skyrocket so high. This has led a significant group of them to send a letter as a coalition, to the FCC, who manages the RDOF. That is one thing that you can always count on with the government, an ever-growing proliferation of stupid acronyms. The FCC has stated that they will hold these ISPs to the bids they submitted and will not give them an easy way out, at least not automatically. These businesses need to sort things out better for themselves when they put forth their bids. My uncle ran a general contracting company for something like 30 years (it was done in by some bad deals, coupled with the 2008 crash), and I remember hearing about the bidding process from time to time. You had to be really on point in order to give a good, accurate bid so that there weren’t cut-rate shenanigans happening in order to actually make money for the company and their sub-contractors. I do not pity these ISPs who zealously under-bid themselves chasing these contracts.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/fccs-rural-broadband-fund-faces-trouble-isps-want-more-money

WE 3 – Cybersecurity Firm Tenable Slams Microsoft
Just a few days after Sen. Wyden’s letter last week, Amit Yoran, the CEO of cybersecurity firm, Tenable, released a blog excoriating the giant for its practices. One of his researchers discovered a critical vulnerability in the Azure cloud infrastructure which “could allow a hacker to access applications and sensitive data, including authentication secrets, from enterprise customers that use Azure.” Using this exploit, they were able to easily and quickly discover the authentication secrets to a bank which uses the Azure Cloud. They uncovered this and reported it back in March. Now, more than 90 days later, it has yet to be fully patched. We are looking at more than 4 months after it was discovered, and any client whose applications were launched before the partial patch are still vulnerable, including the bank which was used as a test case. MS, of course, claims that it has fully taken care of the problem for everybody, now. However, the patching process was incredibly slow, allegedly because they wanted to develop a “quality patch”. I’m sorry, the FOSS community would take care of something like this with a minimum of fuss, in probably half the time. Microsoft’s excuses are as poor as their ethics appear to be around this issue. Yes, I will make hay on this issue for as long as it exists. This is still more reason why everyone needs to get as far away from Microsoft products as quickly as they can. Linux is the best option, though unfortunately is still not a 100% thing for many, as certain software simply will not function on Linux, because developers are stubborn and publishers are unwilling to take a chance on the scrappy underdog of the desktop space, though most of them run their cloud services on Linux servers. That, at least, is the best excuse I can come up with, from outside the halls of these institutions. If you want to learn more about switching, take a look at my website: https://techfreedom.pro/freed-computer/
https://www.pcmag.com/news/cybersecurity-firm-blasts-microsoft-for-slow-incomplete-bug-patches

WE 4 – Undersea Cables: The Unsung Heroes of the Information Age
What are they? How do they work? Why can you watch a concert live from overseas with minimal lag? These are the backbone of the internet. There are over 500 undersea fiber optic cables which crisscross our oceans, each handles a different batch of throughput. The average one is about as thick as a garden hose, and can handle anywhere from 50-400 terabits per second of data per cable, and companies who are working to improve the underlying tech see a potential path forward to creating cables which could handle up to 5 petabits of data per second (10x more bandwidth than today’s best cables). This is based on multiplying the number of cores per cable, and moving toward hollow core cables, as the speed of light is up to 47% faster in air vs glass, which would reduce latency and increase the overall speed of transfers.
This article observes that these cables, while vulnerable to breakages and intentional attacks, can not only bring faster internet speeds, and lower prices, but a 3% to 4% boost in employment and a 5% to 7% boost to economic activity in areas where they are installed but hadn’t been present before. The most frequent causes for breakages are unintentional, via anchor dragging during storms, or fishing-related incidents. However, other natural disasters, such as major storms and earthquakes are also common causes for breakage in these fragile cables which enable so much of the modern world to be as it is. You might be thinking, “well what about Starlink and other satellite-based communications?” Those only handle perhaps 1% of the world’s traffic right now. It makes far more sense to further improve and perfect the undersea cable network we have than it does to throw too much more effort into satellite communications, which can be interfered with by weather, and have far greater latency than the cable-based options which currently exist.
About 2/3 of the traffic comes from and through the hyperscalers. These are companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta. Ones whom I have a tendency to hate on whenever possible. However, their investments in laying, maintaining, and developing the new forms of these undersea fiber optic cables is immense, as data is their business. A new transatlantic cable costs between $250-300 million to install. They operate something like 400 of the 552 extant or planned cables, spanning 870,000 miles. There is a slated $10 billion in cables planned to be laid in the next couple of years as well. As you can imagine, it is a big deal to have a cut cable, but with around 500 active at any given time, the load sharing is not that big of a deal. At any given time there are 10 cables in need of repair. These repairs involve fishing out a damaged end of a cable, splicing in a new length, then running it to the other damaged end and splicing it all together. This is costly, as you need a similar craft to those which do the installs to actually fix these cables. Those ships house multiple mega-spools of the cable, and depending on the thickness of a given cable, that could mean up to 600 miles of the cable per spool. The thicker cables, which are being developed now, house multiple fiber optic cores, and this cuts down on the length which will fit on one of these massive spools for obvious reasons. With conventional fiber optic cables, one of these ships can handle up to 1800 miles of cable per trip.
What makes these so expensive, other than the fact that you’re talking about several hundred miles of fine, optically perfect glass tubes at the core of these cables? Every 30-60 miles, a repeater, has to be included in the cable, so that the signal doesn’t get lost, as with any other kind of cable. The law of entropy says that every signal, whether photons or electrons, will lose cohesion if pushed too far at a shot. This loss of cohesion will cause loss of data, so is unacceptable. If you want more information, just read the article linked below.

https://www.cnet.com/home/internet/features/the-secret-life-of-the-500-cables-that-run-the-internet/

WE 5 – Elon and X Using Lawfare to Shut Down Critics
Mr. Free Speech Absolutist himself can’t take the heat. A small non profit which exists to combat online hate speech (whatever the hell that actually means, since so much seems to change almost daily in the definition of that term). Musk & company is suing the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) of “unlawful acts” to “improperly gain access” to its data. What unlawful acts do they allege? More or less committing libel against the tech company through multiple reports published which state that X (formerly Twitter) has seen an explosion in what is categorized as “hate speech” because according to the data it gathered, the platform has been ignoring up to 99% of complaints against Blue Check accounts. The platform alleges that CCDH illegally scraped data from it, and improperly had access to a Brandwatch (a tool which allows companies to keep tabs on the conversations around them, their products, and services) account. These are big deal issues, and perhaps Elon & Co are right to sue for damages, as many advertisers paused spending when these reports were released, hurting the profitability of the platform. On the other hand, this is a really bad look for him. We’ll see what happens here, will the billionaire Goliath be vindicated, or will the David in this story win out? Do we want the David to win here? Is Hate Speech a valid concern, or do we simply need to grow some thicker skin and disconnect from the programming that tells us that outrage = rightness? What do you guys think?
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66376988

WE 6 – No More Glowy-Glowy Hot Lightbulbs
This is DUMB. Incandescent bulbs just work. They may not last as long as some other more recent tech, but at least they aren’t toxic (usually). They are inefficient and can be dangerous, but they don’t flicker, are easily adjusted, and generally have a more pleasant color temperature than many other options. Now, retailers are no longer allowed to sell regular, old incandescent bulbs any more. The primary concern here is energy usage, and the authorities, in their infinite wisdom, and likely well-lined pockets, courtesy of companies who make LED light fixtures and others in that space. I can understand banning CFLs, those things are terrible. But incandescent bulbs are classic and cozy, even if they are inefficient and wear out more quickly than alternatives do, because they are so simple and literally have a burning filament in the middle of a glass enclosure. So your general purpose lamp bulbs have been banned (those you would put in most lighting fixtures), but “specialty bulbs, three-way bulbs, chandelier bulbs, refrigerator bulbs, plant grow lights and others” have not been. This all reeks of special interest money from the mega corps who manufacture LED fixtures and “bulbs”, as well as government overreach. Trump was right to pause this piece of crap back in 2019. Say I’m just wanting to live in the past, but LED tech is not all it’s cracked up to be. I’ve never seen an LED bulb that didn’t flicker, and that can cause eye strain and headaches to be exasperated. There has to be a better way to do this. Besides, many people already made the switch to LED for the most part, years ago, right? Many were brainwashed by the Eco-cult into valuing the environment more than their own health and pocketbooks. There have not been enough studies done on the effects of LED on health and well being.
https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/incandescent-lightbulb-ban-heres-what-you-need-to-know/

WE 7 – Heard About LK-99 Yet?
It is alleged to be a room-temperature superconductor. This is a holy grail for materials science. Something that scientists have been trying to discover and develop for 50 years. What’s the big deal? Right now, in order for something to offer next to no electrical resistance (thus the term “super” conductor) it has to be supercooled to near absolute zero, or -473º Kelvin. This is a VERY expensive proposition, if/when we figure out a material which can function similarly at ambient temperatures would save a whole lot of energy and effort to achieve things like faster, more stable computers, including quantum computers, as well as maglev trains, and the like. Now conductors have to be constantly super cooled with something like liquid helium in order to achieve this electron-pairing property which greatly improves efficiency for those materials. A South Korean team claims they have found just such a combination of materials, which they have dubbed “LK-99”. There is a problem, though, no one has been successful in replicating their results. We will see what happens with this substance and if it is found to be this holy grail, or perhaps it might lead to it. This would change the world in a big way, you guys. That is why X has been on fire with speculations about it since it was announced. The team has uploaded a pair of related papers to arXIV, which is one database used by scientists to get their work peer-reviewed before it is published elsewhere. What do you guys think about this? Epic? Lame? Huh?

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/lk-99-superconductor-maybe-a-breakthrough-maybe-not-so-much/