Sunday night, John Oliver merely pointed out a problem (again), and the results were pretty predictable if you’re familiar with the last time he did similar. The most recent episode of HBO’s Last Week Tonight’s main segment concerns net neutrality and all the ways Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai has tried explaining that it’s a frivolous concept — sentiments echoed by senator Ted Cruz and others in a recent Washington Post op-ed. Well, as a result of Oliver setting up a URL that makes it incredibly easy to express your interest in maintaining an open internet to the FCC, parts of the regulatory body’s website have been crippled under the server load.
Page loads for GoFCCYourself.com are lethargic, but sections of the FCC website that Oliver’s custom URL doesn’t point to seem to be running normally. It’s just the comment page for the net neutrality case that’s been struggling under the sudden influx of traffic here. The reason for the redirect in the first place? As Oliver illustrates in the video below, finding the actual page to tell former Verizon lawyer Pai and his compatriots that an open internet is deeply important to you was extremely convoluted.
As you can imagine, this isn’t the type of thing that’d reside on the FCC’s (currently) functioning homepage. Getting to the comment section involves finding the comment page, knowing the proceeding number and then realizing that the resulting link with "+ Express" means that’s where you go to register your feelings on the issue. GoFCCYourself sidesteps all that and takes you directly to the comment page. It’s pretty handy, which probably at least partly explains why the site is experiencing so many issues at the moment.
Unlike the last time this happened, the FCC has yet to tweet about the page’s non-responsiveness so we’ve reached out for more information and will update this post should it arrive. Something tells us the organization has its hands full with other problems this morning, so maybe we shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for a comment.
Update: The FCC has responded with the following comment from chief information officer Dr. David Bray, saying that the comment page was hit by multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks:
"Beginning on Sunday night at midnight, our analysis reveals that the FCC was subject to multiple distributed denial-of-service attacks (DDos). These were deliberate attempts by external actors to bombard the FCC’s comment system with a high amount of traffic to our commercial cloud host. These actors were not attempting to file comments themselves; rather they made it difficult for legitimate commenters to access and file with the FCC.
While the comment system remained up and running the entire time, these DDoS events tied up the servers and prevented them from responding to people attempting to submit comments. We have worked with our commercial partners to address this situation and will continue to monitor developments going forward."
The old science fiction fantasy of a flying car that both drives on the ground and flies in the air is unlikely to revolutionize daily commutes. Instead, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and aerospace companies dream of electric-powered aircraft that can take off vertically like helicopters but have the flight efficiency of airplanes. The German startup Lilium took a very public step forward in that direction by demonstrating the first electric-powered jet capable of vertical takeoff and la
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The main section of Fuchsia shows a profile picture, and tapping on it will reveal some power controls. Above this section are recent apps, and below is a Google Now-style suggestion panel.
There’s a tablet mode, too.
Tap on one of the cards for a full-screen app.
You can long press on one of the apps to drag them on top of each other. This will start a split screen more.
Here’s dragging in tablet mode.
Release and you’ll get a split-screen interface.
Split screen with three apps on a tablet.
Four apps on a tablet.
Here are three phone screens with a tab interface.
The suggestions panel also can bring up Fuchsia’s keyboard.
.” The OS first popped up in August last year, but back then it was just a command line. Now the mysterious project has a crazy new UI we can look at, so let’s dive in.
Unlike Android and Chrome OS, Fuchsia is not based on Linux—it uses a new, Google-developed microkernel called “Magenta.” With Fuchsia, Google would not only be dumping the Linux kernel, but also the GPL: the OS is licensed under a mix of BSD 3 clause, MIT, and Apache 2.0. Dumping Linux might come as a bit of a shock, but the Android ecosystem seems to have no desire to keep up with upstream Linux releases. Even the Google Pixel is still stuck on Linux Kernel 3.18, which was first released at the end of 2014.
Google’s documentation describes Magenta as targeting “modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of RAMÂ with arbitrary peripherals doing open-ended computation.” Google hasn’t made any public, official comments on why Fuchsia exists or what it is for, leaving us only to speculate. The “modern phone” shout out certainly sounds like something that could eventually compete with Android, but for now the OS is so early, it’s hard to tell.
Fuchsia is impossible to talk about without mentioning a hundred other related projects that also have code names. The interface and apps are written using Google’s Flutter SDK, a project that actually produces cross-platform code that runs on Android and iOS. Flutter apps are written in Dart, Google’s reboot of JavaScript which, on mobile, has a focus on high-performance, 120fps apps. It also has a Vulkan-based graphics renderer called “Escher” that lists “Volumetric soft shadows” as one of its features, which seems custom-built to run Google’s shadow-heavy “Material Design” interface guidelines.
Armadillo, the Fuchsia System UI
This all leads us to an interesting point right now: the Fuchsia interface is written with the Flutter SDK, which is cross-platform. This means that, right now, you can grab chunks of Fuchsia and run it on an Android device. Fuchsia first went public in August 2016, and but back then compiling it would get you nothing more than a command line. Thanks to Hotfix.net for pointing out that the Fuchsia System UI, called “Armadillo” is actually pretty interesting now.
It’s possible to download the source and compile Fuchsia’s System UI into an Android APK and install it on an Android device. It consists of a wild reimagining of a home screen along with a keyboard, a home button, and (kind of) a window manager. Nothing really “works”—it’s all a bunch of placeholder interfaces that don’t do anything. There’s also a great readme in the Fuchsia source that describes what the heck is going on.
The official Armadillo logo, clearly done by one of Google’s top artists.
The home screen is a giant vertically scrolling list. In the center you’ll see a (placeholder) profile picture, the date, a city name, and a battery icon. Above the are “Story” cards—basically Recent Apps—and below it is a scrolling list of suggestions, sort of like a Google Now placeholder. Leave the main screen and you’ll see a Fuchsia “home” button pop up on the bottom of the screen, which is just a single white circle.
The center profile picture can be tapped on, and here you’ll bring up a menu that’s a bit like Android’s Quick Settings. The top row of icons shows the battery and connectivity. Below that you’ll get sliders for volume and brightness, and icons for airplane mode, do not disturb, and auto rotate. You can interact with the buttons and sliders, but they won’t actually do anything on Android. Below that are buttons labeled “log out” and “more,” which don’t work at all.
Above the profile section are a bunch of cards labeled “Story [something].” The readme describes stories as “a set of apps and/or modules that work together for the user to achieve a goal.” That seems pretty close to a recent apps list, maybe (eventually) with some kind of grouping feature. Tapping on any card will load it as a full-screen interface, and since one is labeled “email,” it’s pretty obvious that these are apps. The list is sorted by “last opened” so the most recently-used cards will sit at the bottom of the list.
This list also has some window-management features. You can long press on a card and drag it around, and if you drop it on top of another app, it will trigger a split screen mode. The split screen system seems really capable, and probably needs to be reigned in a bit. Â You can do a 50/50 split vertically or horizontally. You can drag in a third app and 33/33/33 split horizontally or vertically, or a 50/50 split next to a full-height app, or a have a tab bar appear for the three full screen interfaces. You can drag in four apps and do a 75/25 split on one side of the screen and 25/75 on the other, and then you can keep dragging in apps until the whole thing crashes. Go back the story list and you’ll see your split screen layout is reflected in the card, too, which is nice.
The bottom “Google Now” panel starts with a search bar mockup. Tapping on it will bring up a keyboard, but this is not the Android system keyboard, and it is instead a custom Fuchsia interface. It has a new, dark theme, and things like long-pressing for symbols or settings do not work. Below that appears to be Google Now, which has several “suggestion” cards. They seem to be a little different than Google Now’s news, weather, and calendar suggestions though, with the docs saying “Conceptually a suggestion is a representation of an action the user can take to augment an existing story or to start a new one.” That almost makes it seem like an app launcher.
A long road ahead
With any new project at Google, it’s hard to know what the scale of the project will be. Is this a “20 percent” project that will be forgotten about in a year or something more important? Luckily, we have a direct statement from a Fuchsia developer on the matter. In the public Fuchsia IRC channel, Fuchsia developer Travis Geiselbrecht told the chat room the OS “isn’t a toy thing, it’s not a 20% project, it’s not a dumping ground of a dead thing that we don’t care about anymore.”
The Fuchsia logo.
Android was conceived in the days before the iPhone. It started as an OS for cameras, and then became a BlackBerry clone, before being quickly retooled after the iPhone unveiling. With Android, Google is still chained to decisions it made years ago, before it knew anything about managing a mobile OS that ships on billions of smartphones. I’d say the two biggest problems with Android right now are
Getting OS updates rolled out across the third-party hardware ecosystem
A lack of focus on smooth UI performance.
While there hasn’t been anything said about an update plan, the OS’s reliance on the Dart programming language means it has a focus on high-performance.
Fuchsia really seems like a project that asks “how would we design Android today, if we could start over?” It’s a brand-new, Google-developed kernel running a brand-new, Google-developed SDK that uses a brand-new, Google-developed programming language and it’s all geared to run Google’s Material Design interface as quickly as possible. Google gets to dump Linux and the GPL, it can dump Java and the problems it caused with Oracle, and Google can basically insulate itself from all of Android’s upstream projects and bring all the development in-house. Doing such a thing on the scale of Android today would be a massive project.
The hardest part might not even be developing the OS, but coming up with some kind of transition plan from Android, which has grown to be the world’s most popular operating system. The “cross platform” feature of the Flutter SDK sounds important for a transition plan. If Google could get developers to start writing apps in Flutter, it would be creating an app ecosystem that ran on iOS, Android, and, eventually, Fuchsia. Google has also shown that it is able and willing the make the Android Runtime work on non-Android platforms with Chrome OS, so if Google does choose to go through with a transition plan, perhaps it could port and entire Android stack over to Fuchsia as a stop-gap app solution.
Back in August when Fuchsia went public, Geiselbrecht told the Fuchsia IRC channel “The Magenta project [started] about 6 months ago now” which would be somewhere around February 2016. Android hung around inside Google for about five years before it launched on a real product. If Fuchsia follows a similar path, and everything goes well, maybe we can expect a consumer product sometime around 2020. Then again this is Google, so it could all be cancelled before it ever sees the light of day. Fuchsia has a long road ahead of it.
The Air Force’s secret X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle landed at NASA ‘s Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility Sunday, setting off a sonic boom that surprised residents.
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The Air Force’s secret X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle landed at NASA ‘s Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility Sunday, setting off a sonic boom that surprised residents.
Secretary of the Air Force Publi
The Air Force’s experimental X-37B space plane announced the end of its nearly two-year mission by creating a sonic boom on Sunday that surprised residents along Florida’s Space Coast. Officials have provided only vague details about the unmanned craft’s more than 700-day mission.
“Not much is known about the 30-foot-long robotic spacecraft or what it took to space,” as member station WMFE reports.
The X-37B is an “orbital test vehicle” that looks like a miniature space shuttle — it even used the old shuttle runway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center when it landed Sunday. To reach orbit, it rides on an Atlas V rocket.
This was the fourth mission for the reusable vehicle, and the first time it’s landed in Florida. Earlier trips have ended at the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
Sunday’s landing sparked a flurry of tweets and questions about the sonic boom, with The Orlando Sentinel reporting that before the landing, officials had refused to confirm rumors of a pending return to Florida. The Air Force announced the landing in a tweet — after it had occurred. By then, windows had been rattled and residents had been startled.
“But it wasn’t just Central Floridians who heard the spacecraft,” the paper says. “Reports came from as far away as Tampa and Fort Myers.”
Confirmation of the landing was met with relief in at least one household, as a resident tweeted, “CENTRAL FLORIDA HAD A SONIC BOOM IM NOT CRAZY.”
The space plane has been the object of frequent speculation about its potential military uses, particularly in either surveillance or some type of combat application, as NPR’s Scott Neuman reported in a roundup of theories about the craft back in 2014.
The Air Force says that the program includes the testing of many technologies, from guidance and control (Sunday’s landing was autonomous) to thermal protection and advanced propulsion systems. The craft is powered by gallium arsenide solar cells with lithium-ion batteries.
As WMFE’s Brendan Byrne writes:
“The space plane’s development began in 1999. NASA wanted to use the vehicle to repair satellites in orbit. When that proved to be too costly, the Department of Defense picked up the project as a part of its Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In 2006, the Air Force announced it would develop what is now the X-37B, and launched the experimental space plane for the first time in 2010.”
The craft is managed by the Air Force Rapid Capabilities Office, which describes its mission as developing “combat support and weapon systems by leveraging defense-wide technology development efforts and existing operational capabilities.”
The Air Force’s public information about the craft focuses on its role in researching reusable space vehicles and establishing a “space test platform for the United States Air Force.”
Military space programs “are as big as NASA,” astrophysicist and astronomer Jonathan McDowell told NPR’s Here and Now back in 2015, when the X-37B left for its most recent mission.
At the time, McDowell said there are around 20 to 25 “full-fledged spy satellites or other really secret vehicles” that orbit the Earth.
The concept of militarizing space is one that’s still developing, McDowell said, noting the distinction between the use of satellites solely to support on-ground operations and their use to snoop on, and even interfere with, with other satellites.
Civilian satellite spotters are able to track the more than 5-ton X-37B as it orbits Earth. Fueling theories that it aids surveillance programs, trackers found that at least one earlier mission followed an orbit that took it over countries that included Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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