Ars Technica

The Department of Defense has invested millions of dollars over the past few years investigating social media, social networks, and how information spreads across them.

While Facebook and Cornell University researchers manipulated what individuals saw in their social media streams, military-funded research -- including projects funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Social Media in Strategic Communications (SMISC) program -- has looked primarily into how messages from influential members of social networks propagate.

One study, funded by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), has gone a step further. The research demonstrates that the mathematical principles used to control groups of autonomous robots can be applied to social networks in order to control human behavior.

Rep Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) wants to make sure the Federal Communications Commission never interferes with "states' rights" to protect private Internet service providers from having to compete against municipal broadband networks.

She proposed an amendment to a general government appropriations bill that would prohibit taxpayer funds from being used by the FCC to preempt state laws governing municipal broadband.

Verizon Internet customers who want to watch Netflix at high quality and without interruption just can't catch a break. While Comcast subscribers saw near-immediate speed improvements after Netflix paid for a direct connection to the Comcast network, Netflix performance on Verizon remains poor -- and it's getting worse.

Comcast spent months preparing network connections with Netflix -- Verizon didn't. Netflix's latest ISP speed rankings show that the average prime time streaming speed on Verizon FiOS dropped from 1.9Mbps in May to 1.58Mbps in June, a decline of 17 percent. Verizon DSL dropped from 1.05Mbps to 0.91Mbps, a decrease of 13 percent.

Apple may be looking to boost usage of the iBeacon feature it introduced in iOS 7.

Router manufacturer Securifi spotted Federal Communications Commission documents certifying a new "Apple iBeacon" device, suggesting that Apple wants to offer beacon hardware alongside a list of smaller third-party manufacturers.

Dozens of lawmakers, municipal officials, and consumer advocacy groups want a thorough investigation of New York's phone system, accusing Verizon of raising prices substantially while allowing landline service to deteriorate throughout the state.

Rate deregulation has harmed customers, the lawmakers and groups wrote in a petition to the New York Public Service Commission (PSC). Verizon has been shifting wireline service from copper to fiber and building out its cellular network, but in the process it's leaving many consumers behind, the petition claims.

The letter quotes New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and previous PSC documents that say Verizon failed to meet quality standards. The petition was signed by 49 State Assembly members (out of 150), seven State Senate members (out of 63), and a member of Congress, US Rep Tim Bishop (D-NY).

Mayors and other officials representing a dozen cities, towns, and counties signed the letter, as did consumer advocacy groups including the AARP and Common Cause New York. The letter was also signed by the New York State AFL-CIO and a Communications Workers of America representative.

Nielsen Soundscan released its annual mid-year US music sales report, and it touted the biggest musical movers and shakers of 2014 to date.

However, while the rest of the top-20 singles chart was full of million-plus selling songs, no other full-length album broke the million mark, and the total numbers compared to 2013 were drastically lower.

Total album sales, combining physical and digital numbers, were down 15 percent to 121 million, and while Nielsen didn't confirm how the album numbers split, the announcement of a 13 percent drop in digital singles sales was indicative that MP3s weren't picking up the sales slack. The digital-single drop of nearly 90 million sales, down to 593.6 million, also didn't see an equivalent boost in streaming numbers on services such as Spotify; those rose 42 percent to 70.3 million streams, but that was only a jump of 20 million.

The numbers didn't clarify whether streaming services saw any major jumps in subscription purchases in 2014, as well.

Microsoft has surrendered the 23 domain names it confiscated from dynamic domain hosting service No-IP.com, a move that begins the process of restoring millions of connections that went dark as a result of the highly controversial legal action.

At the time this post was being prepared, No-IP had recovered 18 of the domains and was in the process of reacquiring the remaining five from Public Interest Registry, the registry for Internet addresses ending in .org, No-IP spokeswoman Natalie Goguen told Ars.

People who rely on No-IP subdomains that don't end in .org should already have service restored, as long as the domain name service (DNS) server they use has been updated to reflect the transfer. Users who are still experiencing connectivity problems should try using DNS services from Google or OpenDNS, which have both updated their lookups to incorporate the transfers.

Microsoft confiscated the No-IP domains in late June through a secretive legal maneuver that didn't give the dynamic DNS provider an opportunity to oppose the motion in court. Microsoft's ex parte request was part of a legal action designed to dismantle two sprawling networks of infected Windows computers that were abusing No-IP in an attempt to evade takedown. As partial justification for the request, Microsoft lawyers argued No-IP didn't follow security best practices.

A sub-reddit dedicated to the video game Hearthstone exploded with discussion. A Finnish e-sports tournament had just been announced, and the Helsinki event, scheduled for July 31, would include a competition based on the Blizzard-produced card-battle game, complete with a grand prize of €1,000 and free travel to the tournament's world finals in November.

User Karuta posted the tourney's rules and highlighted a strange stipulation: only men need apply. As people dug in to the tournament's details, they found that the whole affair was divided into male- and female-only categories, and worse, women were invited to fewer competitions.

Public outcry came swiftly, and within less than a day, IeSF posted an update that hinted at a reversal of course. "Our top priority is to promote e-sports in the best ways we can," the company posted to its Facebook page. "We believe that listening is important, and we're now collecting your opinions from the social media, and we will update soon." That course has since been fully reversed.

New York is shaping up as a major battleground for Comcast's proposed acquisition of Time Warner Cable.

While the $45.2 billion merger will be scrutinized by federal officials, it also needs approval at the state level.

TWC has 2.2 million cable TV, Internet, and phone customers in 1,150 New York communities, and hundreds of them have called on the New York Public Service Commission (PSC) to block the sale to Comcast. Comcast doesn't compete against TWC for subscribers, and its territory in New York is limited but includes a VoIP phone service offered to residential and business customers in 10 communities.

"Both Time Warner Cable and Comcast already have monopolies in each and every territory in which they do business today, and combining the companies will reinforce those individual territorial monopolies under a single corporate umbrella, with NBC-Universal thrown in to boot," resident Frank Brice argued in a comment to the PSC posted. Brice complained that "The constant, yearly rate increases imposed on us by Time Warner Cable are and continue to be outrageous, outsized, and unwarranted. "Given where I live in the mid-Hudson valley, 100 miles from New York City and 50 miles from Albany, I cannot get over-the-air TV broadcasts, and I have no choice in my cable-TV provider unless I choose a satellite provider." Brice is "so unhappy with Time Warner Cable" that he buys DSL Internet and phone service from Verizon, which hasn't built FiOS in his area.

Brice's comment is similar to many others submitted by residents to the PSC's merger proceeding.

Millions of legitimate servers that rely on dynamic domain name services from No-IP.com suffered outages after Microsoft seized 22 domain names it said were being abused in malware-related crimes against Windows users.

Microsoft enforced a federal court order making the company the domain IP resolver for the No-IP domains. Microsoft said the objective of the seizure was to identify and reroute traffic associated with two malware families that abused No-IP services.

Almost immediately, end users, some of which were actively involved in Internet security, castigated the move as heavy handed, since there was no evidence No-IP officially sanctioned or actively facilitated the malware campaign, which went by the names Bladabindi (aka NJrat) and Jenxcus (aka NJw0rm).

"By becoming the DNS authority for those free dynamic DNS domains, Microsoft is now effectively in a position of complete control and is now able to dictate their configuration," Claudio Guarnieri, co-founder of Radically Open Security, wrote in an e-mail to Ars Technica. "Microsoft fundamentally swept away No-IP, which has seen parts of its own DNS infrastructure legally taken away."