Barryke writes: Verizon has blamed Netflix for the streaming slowdowns their customers have been seeing. It seems the Verizon blog post defending this accusation has backfired in a spectacular way: The chief has clearly admitted that Verizon has capacity to spare, and is deliberately constraining throughput from network providers. Level3, a major ISP that interconnects with Verizon’s networks, responded by showing a diagram that visualizes the underpowered interconnect problem and explaining why Verizon’s own post indicates how it restricts data flow. Level3 also offered to pay for the necessary upgrades to Verizon hardware: “… these cards are very cheap, a few thousand dollars for each 10 Gbps card which could support 5, 000 streams or more. If that’s the case, we’ll buy one for them. Maybe they can’t afford the small piece of cable between our two ports. If that’s the case, we’ll provide it. Heck, we’ll even install it.” I’m curious to see Verizon’s response to this straightforward accusation of throttling paying users (which tech-savvy readers were quick to confirm). Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Verizon’s Accidental Mea Culpa
Well, this is disconcerting. According to an announcement today from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), vials of the smallpox virus were found in a lab in Maryland that was not only unapproved to be handling the live pathogens—it was unequipped . Read more… 
Starfish can re-grow arms; lizards can sprout fresh legs; and hell, flatworms can essentially rematerialize from barely nothing. So why can’t humans do the same? Read more… 
Rectangular screens are so square. Which is presumably why Sharp has announced a new technology called Free-Form Display—that could allow screens to come in any space, and reduce bezel size to almost zero. Read more… 
As the number and variety of air, space, and surface-based threats to our naval fleets continue to proliferate, defending against them all is getting harder and harder. But equipped with this new unified threat detection system from Raytheon, our Arleigh Burke-class destroyers will know what’s coming from 30 times farther away. Read more… 
An anonymous reader writes in with news that the IRS lost email scandal is far from over. Representative Steve Stockman (R-TX) has sent a formal letter to the National Security Agency asking it to hand over “all its metadata” on the e-mail accounts of a former division director at the Internal Revenue Service. “Your prompt cooperation in this matter will be greatly appreciated and will help establish how IRS and other personnel violated rights protected by the First Amendment, ” Stockman wrote on Friday. The request came hours after the IRS told a congressional committee that it had “lost” all of the former IRS Exempt Organizations division director’s e-mails between January 2009 and April 2011. Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Tekla Perry (3034735) writes “Former Sun executives and employees gathered in Mountain View, Calif., in May, and out came the ‘real’ stories. Andy Bechtolsheim reports that Steve Jobs wasn’t the only one who set out to copy the Xerox Parc Alto; John Gage wonders why so many smart engineers couldn’t figure out that it would have been better to buy tables instead of kneepads for the folks doing computer assembly; Vinod Khosla recalls the plan to ‘rip-off Sun technology, ‘ and more.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
In a rare gesture of transparency, the Department of Homeland Security just announced that hackers recently targeted and compromised a public utility’s control system. They didn’t say exactly where, but it happened inside United States borders. And it doesn’t sound like it was even that hard. Read more…