2026-07-07 05:13:37
The Federal Communications Commission will vote to eliminate a rule that requires Internet service providers to list all of their so-called "passthrough" fees on an easily accessible broadband price label. The FCC vote could also make the price labels themselves a bit harder for consumers to find.
ISPs routinely advertise prices much lower than those actually charged to consumers on their monthly bills. One method of raising monthly bill prices above advertised rates is to tack on fees that, ISPs claim, are used to offset charges imposed by local governments.
ISPs would be well within their rights to advertise accurate monthly prices and charge those exact prices on monthly bills. But because ISPs rarely do that, the FCC has required them to make specific price disclosures to consumers for the past decade.
2026-07-07 04:52:42
Mysterious drone flights that disrupted major European airports and flew over NATO member military bases hosting US nuclear weapons may be the work of a coordinated Kremlin campaign launched from Russian-linked commercial ships.
That recent assessment from the UK-based International Institute for Strategic Studies used automatic identification system (AIS) maritime tracking data and other publicly available data to show how Russian-linked ships and “shadow fleet” vessels that transport sanctioned Russian oil were often located nearby during various drone incidents. The report suggests that the drone incidents—which impacted a dozen NATO member countries and Ireland between August 2024 and February 2026—also revealed the vulnerability of European air defenses against surveillance and harassment incursions by low-cost drones.
The IISS report identified 144 drone sightings over Europe during that time period that were unlikely to involve hobbyist recreational drones or drone activity related to the war in Ukraine. About 48 percent of the sightings took place over military bases, 26 percent happened over critical infrastructure such as ports and energy or industrial facilities, and 18 percent occurred over civilian airports. Most occurred at night or in the early morning hours before sunrise, and the drones themselves were typically described in media reports as resembling “professional” or “military-style” drones.
2026-07-07 03:57:56
Did you know that the space shuttle once launched the Statue of Liberty into space?
In fact, there were two "Lady Liberties" on board Discovery when it lifted off on its fourth flight in April 1985. To be fair, each statue was only 15 inches tall (38.1 centimeters), but they were also each made of copper that was removed from the full-size statue during its then-still-ongoing restoration.
After the weeklong STS-51D mission was over, one of the space-flown statues was placed on display, and the other was melted down to create copper seals, which were then sold to the public by the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Centennial Commission.
2026-07-07 01:48:45
Last week, just before the US started its break for the July Fourth holiday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed a new rule that would change how it regulated exposure to radiation. The Trump administration has been pushing to restart construction of nuclear power plants in the US, and many pro-nuclear advocates have been complaining about the US's existing regulations, portraying them as the main barrier to the flourishing of the industry. So, it had seemed likely that major revisions were coming.
Instead, the NRC's proposed new rules endorse the science behind its current rules and suggest that any problems are largely in the vagueness of the terminology that it has been using. So, instead, it's endorsing standards that are meant to accomplish the same thing, but avoid using some of the language it had relied on. Probably the clearest indication of the evolutionary change at play is that the NRC estimates the changing rules will save industry—not just power, but also medical and research applications—only about $9.5 million a year.
There are two technical abbreviations at the center of US nuclear regulations. The first is LNT, which stands for "linear non-threshold." It's in reference to the issue of whether there's any level of radiation that is so low that it no longer produces harmful biological effects—the "threshold" in LNT. The "non-threshold" implies that it doesn't, and that's in keeping with biology, which has demonstrated that even single particles or photons of radiation can damage DNA and that the mechanisms cells have for repairing that damage are inherently error-prone. The "linear" in LNT simply describes how the impact of radiation scales directly with the dose.
2026-07-07 01:14:09
High above the remote Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and the northernmost part of Australia, an air-launched rocket fired into space on Independence Day weekend to kick off a weekslong pursuit of a NASA astronomy satellite perilously close to falling out of orbit.
The endeavor to rescue NASA's Swift satellite is the first mission of its kind. NASA put out a call for commercial companies less than a year ago to propose how they could rapidly build and launch a small satellite to latch onto the Swift spacecraft and boost its altitude so that it doesn't come down in a few months.
Katalyst Space Technologies responded with the best offer. NASA awarded the company a contract last September to build and launch a mission to rescue Swift. A little more than nine months later, Katalyst's nearly half-ton Link satellite is safely in orbit. For anyone who follows the space industry, building, testing, and launching a functioning first-of-its-kind satellite of that size in less than a year is a remarkable achievement; it would usually take several years.
2026-07-07 00:44:18
Anthropic quickly removed a tracker secretly monitoring Claude Code users in China after a security researcher exposed the hidden code and condemned the spyware-like tracking as a “serious breach of user trust.”
Last week, a web developer known as “Thereallo” was researching privacy issues in Claude Code and was shocked to find that the AI firm was using “prompt steganography” to hide code that tracks Chinese users “in plain sight.” This code wasn’t malicious, but it was sending information to Anthropic that most users wouldn’t detect, relying on shorthand markers to quietly flag users’ timezone, proxy, and potential connection to Chinese AI labs that Anthropic has accused of distillation attacks.
On X, Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipar confirmed that the tracker was added to Claude Code as an “experiment” in March. According to Shihipar, the code “was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation.” Regarding the former, The Washington Post found unauthorized retailers have sold access to free models for $1 a month, and pro subscriptions that can cost $100 monthly sell for "as little as $12."
