The FCC swears that a denial of service attack hit its servers hours after Last Week Tonight ‘s John Oliver rallied support for net neutrality, but where’s the evidence? Well, don’t expect it any time soon. In an interview with ZDNet , the regulator’s David Bray says the FCC won’t release the logs that might show who was responsible for the incident. The logs contain private info like IP addresses, he says. Bray does note that there wasn’t a botnet involved, though — instead, the traffic came from commercial cloud services using the FCC’s public programming interface. But if it wasn’t a botnet, then who was involved? Some critics are concerned that the FCC isn’t exactly being forthright. The advocacy group Fight for the Future tells ZDNet that the FCC should disclose information “to the appropriate authorities and to journalists” to have them investigate the data while maintaining privacy. And if there’s an organization behind the attack, the group says, the FCC should divulge who it is. That it isn’t is worrying — does the Commission not know, or is it trying to hide the origins? Fight for the Future is concerned that the traffic is either from net neutrality supporters (and thus evidence that the FCC couldn’t/wouldn’t handle opposition to its net neutrality rollback ) or opponents trying to stifle criticism. And unfortunately, there’s circumstantial evidence that might support either theory. Anti-net neutrality bots recently flooded the FCC’s comments, and Chairman Ajit Pai even suggested that he might honor these obviously fake statements. It doesn’t help that the FCC has since gone into a “sunshine period” where it won’t take new public comments on decisions. And it’s no secret that telecoms are less than fond of net neutrality proponents, especially when they try to expose astroturfing campaigns . Simply put, both the current FCC and internet providers have a vested interest in downplaying net neutrality’s supporters while enshrining its critics. The FCC says it has since upgraded its website to better handle loads, so it isn’t completely unresponsive. Without more disclosures about what happened around the attack, though, it’s impossible to know just how honest it really is — and it’s not helping its case by being unresponsive to public outcries. Via: Gizmodo Source: ZDNet (1) , (2)
Tag: vested-interest
Shellfish-inspired glue stays sticky underwater
Even the strongest human-made glue tends to fail when you dunk it underwater. Purdue researchers, however, think they have a simple solution to this: imitate nature. They’ve developed a polymer adhesive that’s based on the proteins mussels use to cling to rocks. The team’s synthetic creation takes advantage of compounds inside the proteins’ amino acids to bind directly to an intended surface, rather than interacting with water on the surface. The result is a material that not only outperforms the glue you see in the hardware store, but is 17 times stronger than the shellfish’s own adhesive — and that has scientists scratching their heads. Purdue speculates that mussels may only produce adhesives that are just strong enough to keep their bodies attached. A too-strong substance could actually backfire by making it difficult for a mussel to escape predators without hurting itself. The artificial version, meanwhile, is as powerful as humans want it to be. There’s still a long way to go before this glue is ready for real-world use. However, there’s a good chance that could happen. The US military’s Office of Naval Research funded the project, and it clearly has a vested interest in making sure that its constructions survive water. This doesn’t mean that you’ll see warships held together by glue instead of rivets, but the concept isn’t completely far-fetched. Source: Purdue University , ACS
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Shellfish-inspired glue stays sticky underwater