(credit: Aurich Lawson) The Department of Justice today sued DirecTV and its owner, AT&T, saying the satellite TV company colluded with competitors during contentious negotiations to broadcast Los Angeles Dodgers games. Dodgers games have been blacked out in much of Los Angeles because pay-TV providers have been unwilling to pay the price demanded by SportsNet LA, the Dodgers channel operated by the baseball franchise and Time Warner Cable. But the DOJ’s antitrust division placed the blame for this situation on AT&T and DirecTV. In a complaint  filed in US District Court in California, it alleges that DirecTV was a “ringleader” in a coordinated scheme with cable companies Cox and Charter, according to a  DOJ announcement . “Dodgers fans were denied a fair, competitive process when DirecTV orchestrated a series of information exchanges with direct competitors that ultimately made consumers less likely to be able to watch their hometown team,” Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Sallet said in the DOJ announcement. The lack of a competitive negotiation process is especially bad for consumers in a market like cable television, where customers have “only a handful of choices,” he said. Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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US gov’t sues AT&T/DirecTV, calls it “ringleader” of collusion scheme

Once again, large swaths of the Internet in the United States were affected by a major morning network outage today. This time, it was the Tier 1 network service provider Level 3 Communications that was at the center of the problem, which disrupted parts of the Internet’s backbone. But for the moment, it does not appear that the outage was triggered by a denial of service attack or other network attack, like the attack on DNS provider Dyn on October 21 . In a statement sent to the media, Nikki Wheeler, Level 3’s senior director of communications, wrote, “Our technical team is looking into this issue to determine the cause. Our priority is to ensure the reliability of our network and services. We will provide updates as more information becomes available.” A Level 3 spokesperson confirmed that the company’s networks had been restored to normal function by 1600 Greenwich Mean Time (noon US Eastern Time) but said that no other information was available yet. The outage had no major impact on major streaming services that use Level 3, including Netflix and the HBO Go mobile application. But it did affect some customers’ voice and Internet services. Level 3 suffered another brief outage a month ago, caused by a human error. Read 2 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Level 3 drops its packets for hours, causing Internet traffic jam

Federal authorities say a group of scammers that “bilked millions” from US consumers with pop-up ads and hijacked Web browsers has been sued by the Federal Trade Commission. The scheme, which operates under the name Global Access Tech Support, used pop-up ads that told consumers their computers were “hacked, infected, or otherwise compromised,” according to the FTC complaint (PDF) published yesterday. Consumers are then instructed to call a toll-free number in the message. The pop-ups “are typically designed so that consumers are unable to close or navigate around them, rendering consumers’ web browser unusable.” Anyone who calls the toll-free number is connected to telemarketers in India, who then roll out a sales pitch explaining that the caller’s computer is “in urgent need of repair.” The telemarketers claim they’re affiliated with either Microsoft or Apple or are “certified” by those companies. Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Feds strike another multi-national “tech support” scam

Taken in 2014, this picture shows the partly blocked entrance to the Soviet-era bunker system in Poland. In the background, pine-spruce forest overgrowing the hillock was built to camouflage the structure. Wojciech Stephan For the past several years, a group of researchers has been observing a seemingly impossible wood ant colony living in an abandoned nuclear weapons bunker in Templewo, Poland, near the German border. Completely isolated from the outside world, these members of the species Formica polyctena have created an ant society unlike anything we’ve seen before. The Soviets built the bunker during the Cold War to store nuclear weapons, sinking it below ground and planting trees on top as camouflage. Eventually a massive colony of wood ants took up residence in the soil over the bunker. There was just one problem: the ants built their nest directly over a vertical ventilation pipe that leads into the bunker. When the metal covering on the pipe finally rusted away, it left a dangerous, open hole. Every year when the nest expands, thousands of worker ants fall down the pipe and cannot climb back out. The survivors have nevertheless carried on for years underground, building a nest from soil and maintaining it in typical wood ant fashion. Except, of course, that this situation is far from normal. Polish Academy of Sciences zoologist Wojciech Czechowski and his colleagues discovered the nest after a group of other zoologists found that bats were living in the bunker. Though it was technically not legal to go inside, the bat researchers figured out a way to squeeze into the small, confined space and observe the animals inside. Czechowski’s team followed suit when they heard that the place was swarming with ants. What they found, over two seasons of observation, was a group of almost a million worker ants whose lives are so strange that they hesitate to call them a “colony” in the observations they just published in The Journal of Hymenoptera . Because conditions in the bunker are so harsh, constantly cold, and mostly barren, the ants seem to live in a state of near-starvation. They produce no queens, no males, and no offspring. The massive group tending the nest is entirely composed of non-reproductive female workers, supplemented every year by a new rain of unfortunate ants falling down the ventilation shaft. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Bizarre ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker