Cosmo Strikes Again, Taking Over Another Westboro Twitter Account

It feels a little bit like hacker Groundhog Day. After hijacking a Westboro Baptist Church leader’s Twitter account on Monday, Wired has confirmed that the 15-year-old hacker known as Cosmo the God took over another account belonging to one of the of the same church members on Wednesday, using much the same method.

A source with direct knowledge of the attack who spoke on condition of anonymity confirmed to Wired that Cosmo had in fact taken possession of Fred Phelps Jr.’s Twitter account. Phelps Jr. is the son of church leader Fred Phelps Sr. Cosmo took over the @WBCFredJR Twitter account via Phelps’ Hotmail account, which he gained entry to by forwarding the password-reset phone number on the Hotmail account to the phone number he controlled, according to Wired’s source.

Previously, Cosmo had control of church spokesperson and attorney Shirley Lynn Phelps-Roper’s @DearShirley Twitter account for about 24 hours before the account was suspended. During that time, Wired’s source also claims that Cosmo remotely recorded gay porn to her DVR, before canceling her internet service.

Westboro Baptist Church is notorious for picketing funerals of American soldiers killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan. Last week the organization apparently announced its intention to protest at the funerals of the children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut. Following the church’s announcement, the hacker collective Anonymous and others have targeted WBC members online, especially in ways that affect their ability to communicate and operate.

Cosmo and his group UG Nazi took part in many of the highest-profile hacking incidents of 2012, including taking down websites for NASDAQ, CIA.gov, and UFC.com, redirecting 4Chan’s DNS to point to its own Twitter feed, and defeating CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince’s Google two-step authentication. He was arrested in June, as part of a multi-state FBI sting and was recently sentenced to probation until his 21st birthday, during which time he is prohibited from using the internet without supervision and prior consent.

Clearly, the account takeovers in the past few days would violate those terms.

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“Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” “Bully” first theatrical releases to win duPont awards

LOS ANGELES (TheWrap.com) – Two documentary films were among the 14 winners of the 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, making them the first theatrical releases to be honored with the prize. USA Today also won its first duPont award.

“Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” Alison Klayman‘s profile of the Chinese artist-activist, and Emmy-winning filmmaker Lee Hirsch‘s tale of schoolyard torment, “Bully,” won alongside reporting from Current TV, CBS News, NPR, PBS’s “Frontline” and USA Today.

USA Today was honored for multimedia reporting on abandoned lead factories, and NPR’s “StoryCorps” will win its first silver baton.

Five awards will go to local television and radio stations: KCET in Southern California, KLAS-TV in Las Vegas, WVUE-TV in New Orleans, Detroit’s WXYZ-TV and partnerships with WHYY and NPR.

“This exceptional group of journalists represents the best of broadcast, documentary and digital news reporting today,” Bill Wheatley, the outgoing duPont Jury chair and the former executive vice president of NBC News, said in a statement. “These groundbreaking stories set the standard for excellent reporting; journalists gained access and insight into critical issues in the public interest, and they are telling these important stories in new ways.”

Christiane Amanpour, CNN’s chief international correspondent and a global affairs anchor for ABC News will present the awards with CBS News’s Byron Pitts on Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at Columbia’s Low Memorial Library.

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F.D.A. and States Meet About Regulation of Drug Compounders

Mary Calvert/Reuters

Margaret Hamburg, the F.D.A. commissioner, testified on the fungal meningitis outbreak before Congress in November. Dr. Hamburg addressed the need for greater federal oversight of large compounding pharmacies, which mix up batches of drugs on their own, often for much lower prices than major manufacturers charge.

SILVER SPRING, Md. – The Food and Drug Administration conferred with public health officials from 50 states on Wednesday about how best to strengthen rules governing compounding pharmacies in the wake of a national meningitis outbreak caused by a tainted pain medication produced by a Massachusetts pharmacy.

It was the first public discussion of what should be done about the practice of compounding, or tailor-making medicine for individual patients, since the F.D.A. commissioner, Dr. Margaret Hamburg, last month testified in Congress about the need for greater federal oversight of large compounding pharmacies. So far, 620 people in 19 states have been sickened in the outbreak, and 39 of them have died.

Pharmacies fall primarily under state law, and the F.D.A. convened the meeting to get specifics from states on gaps in the regulatory net and how they see the federal role. Large-scale compounding has expanded dramatically since the early 1990s, driven by changes in the health care system, including the rise of hospital outsourcing.

“It is very clear that the health care system has evolved and the role of the compounding pharmacies has really shifted,” Dr. Hamburg said in a telephone interview on Tuesday. She said the laws have not kept pace. “We need legislation that reflects the current environment and the known gaps in our state and federal oversight systems.”

Under current law, compounders are not required to give the F.D.A. access to their books, and about half of all the court orders the agency obtained over the past decade were for pharmacy compounders, though compounders are only a small part of the agency’s regulatory responsibilities.

The F.D.A.'s critics argue that the agency already has all the legal authority it needs to police compounders. They say many compounders have been operating as major manufacturers, shipping to states across the country, and that the F.D.A. should be using its jurisdiction over manufacturers to regulate those companies’ activities.

“There should be one uniform federal standard that is enforced by one agency – the F.D.A.,” said Michael Carome, deputy director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, a nonprofit consumer organization, who has been a critic of the agency’s approach. “They have been lax in enforcing that standard.”

But Dr. Hamburg contends that the distinction is not so simple. Lumping large compounders in with manufacturers would mean they would have to file new drug applications for every product they make, a costly and time-consuming process that is not always necessary for the products they make, which may include IV feeding tube bags. Dr. Hamburg has proposed creating a new federal oversight category for large-scale compounders, separate from manufacturers.

“What concerns me is the idea that we could assert full authority over some of these facilities as though they were manufacturers, as though there were an on-off, black-white option,” Dr. Hamburg said. “That is a heavy-handed way to regulate a set of activities that can make a huge positive difference in providing necessary health care to people.”

Large-scale compounders play an important role in the health care supply chain when they produce quality products, F.D.A. officials say. They fill gaps during shortages and supply hospitals with products that can be made more safely and cost-effectively in bulk than in individual hospitals. Officials said they wanted to make sure the products made by such suppliers were safe, but were also concerned about disrupting that supply.

Carmen Catizone, head of the National Association of Boards of Pharmacy, said states are not equipped to regulate the large-scale compounders and that the F.D.A. needs to find a middle path for regulating them.

“Either hospitals are not going to like the solution, or the manufacturers aren’t going to like the fact that these guys get a shorter path,” he said. “But something’s got to give.”

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Challenging France to Do Business Differently

Pool photo by Bertrand Langlois

President Francois Hollande, at the Élysée Palace this week, turned to the prominent industrialist Louis Gallois for advice on how to put corporate France on a more competitive footing with the rest of Europe.

PARIS — Louis Gallois, one of France’s most influential industrialists, knew he was about to make waves for the country’s Socialist president.

It was late October, and President François Hollande, faced with an alarming deterioration in the economy, had turned to Mr. Gallois for advice on how to put corporate France on a more competitive footing with the rest of Europe.

Mr. Gallois didn’t sugar-coat the message. His report called for a “competitiveness shock” that would require politicians to curb the “cult of regulation” he said was choking business in France.

The report said that unless France relaxed its notoriously rigid labor market, the country would continue on an industrial decline that had destroyed more than 750,000 jobs in a decade and helped shrink France’s share of exports to the European Union to 9.3 percent, from 12.7 percent, during that period. The report also called for cuts to a broad range of business taxes used to pay for big government and France’s expensive social safety net.

But some wonder whether those measures, even if they can be adopted, would suffice. For them, there is a larger question: Can France be fixed?

While the European crisis has made the French acutely aware of the need to modernize the economy, the country may be running short on time. And there are mixed signals on whether the Hollande government is willing to heed the advice.

As details of the report leaked, the French news media went into a frenzy over whether their country — so resistant to change that the government still controls the price of a baguette of bread — was prepared for such upheaval.

Mr. Hollande quickly provided an answer: a competitiveness “pact” between business and government would better suit French society.

As Mr. Hollande’s finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, hastened to explain, “A shock causes trauma, whereas a pact reassures.”

But many observers say reassurance may no longer be an option.

Even the Germans are alarmed: Behind closed doors, Chancellor Angela Merkel and officials in her entourage are said to be worried that a failure by Mr. Hollande to improve competitiveness could ricochet back to the weakening German economy, further stalling what had long been twin engines of growth for Europe.

“The concern is not just that France could be the next candidate affected by turbulence” from the euro crisis, said Lars P. Feld, an economics professor at the University of Freiburg and an adviser to the German government. “The fear is that it doesn’t manage to cope with the loss of competitiveness and therefore produces little growth or perhaps even stagnation for the next few years,” Mr. Feld said. “And that after that, it could become the new sick man of Europe.”

France still has much working in its favor. Second only to Germany as Europe’s biggest economy, and the fifth-largest in the world, France is a wealthy country with a high savings rate, large foreign direct investment and world-class research and development capabilities.

And the interest rate on French 10-year bonds is only about 2 percent. That is much closer to Germany’s rate than to those of the euro zone’s staggering giants, Italy and Spain, which are above 4 percent and 5 percent respectively, as they struggle to clean up their economies.

Yet, last week the French central bank warned that growth would shrink 0.1 percent in the last three months of 2012, after stagnating for most of the year. Last month Moody’s Investors Service followed Standard & Poor’s in stripping France of its triple-A credit rating, saying the government was failing to ignite competitiveness fast enough.

Meanwhile, an ambitious effort Mr. Hollande began shortly after his election in May to cut the deficit to 3 percent next year from 4.5 percent through tax increases and spending cuts may dampen growth further and ratchet up unemployment, which recently neared 11 percent, twice the rate in Germany.

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Philippine Congress OKs bill to offer birth control to poor women

MANILA — Ignoring the Catholic Bishops' Conference of the Philippines' warning that "contraception corrupts the soul," the Philippine Congress on Monday passed a sweeping bill that would provide birth control to millions of poor women.

The historic votes, with bishops and nuns sitting glumly in the gallery, came after the Catholic hierarchy and its political supporters had thwarted the legislation's passage for more than 14 years.

The measure, which President Benigno Aquino III has pledged to sign, would override the de facto ban on contraceptives in Manila's public health clinics, make sex education mandatory in public schools and require hospitals to provide postabortion care, even though abortions will remain illegal.

Although more than 80% of Filipinos are Catholic, polls have shown the church was out of step with its followers on this issue: More than 70% of Filipinos supported the so-called Reproductive Health Bill in a nation where 39% of married women want to avoid pregnancy but are not using modern contraceptives.

"This signals that real and permanent change is afoot in the Philippines," said Jon O'Brien, the Washington-based president of Catholics for Choice. He said the Philippines, with 96 million people, has begun the same transition that occurred in his native Ireland and other developed nations, where church leaders have largely given up on trying to influence parishioners on birth control issues and politicians no longer "bend the knee" to the Catholic hierarchy.

Aquino last week certified the bill as urgent, indicating he wanted to sign it before the Christmas break. His support has inflamed the bishops' conference, whose leader once suggested that the president might be "excommunicated."

The superheated rhetoric continued Monday, with Archbishop Ramon Arguelles telling the Philippine Star newspaper that the president's endorsement would be worse than the gunman who killed 20 children in the Connecticut school shooting last week. "Our president intends to kill 20 million children with a fountain pen," Arguelles was quoted as saying.

Presidential spokesman Edwin Lacierda condemned such words as "unfair," "malicious" and "unbefitting" of the position of a bishop, who he suggested should instead be praying for the elementary school victims.

Access to birth control has become a particularly acrimonious issue in the Philippines, one of the fastest-growing nations in Asia with widespread poverty. Half of the pregnancies in the country are unintended and access to modern contraception is mostly limited to those who can afford it.

The Los Angeles Times in July ran a series, "Beyond 7 Billion," that chronicled the lives of poor women who struggled under a public health system that has either effectively banned pills, condoms and IUDs, or made them unaffordable.

Following Vatican dictates, the bishops oppose all such "artificial" measures to prevent pregnancy, equating them with abortion and saying they promote promiscuity. Instead, they sanction natural measures such as withdrawal or abstinence during a woman's fertile periods.

On Monday, each chamber of the Congress — the vote was133 to 79 in the House of Representatives and 13 to 8 in the Senate — approved its version of the bill that would make contraceptives accessible and affordable. Lawmakers must iron out minor differences in the two versions before sending the bill to Aquino for his signature.

"In the end, democracy won, our people won," said a statement issued by Aquino's Liberal Party.

Monday's votes came after months of intense floor debates, parliamentary maneuvering and efforts to kill the bill with amendments — all of which played out before packed observation galleries that included bishops and nuns. Opponents wore red while supporters wore purple and waved purple lilies. Eve Ensler, the feminist playwright of "The Vagina Monologues," was there to show her support.

One retired archbishop said the church may push for "civil disobedience" in the streets. Another bishop said the Supreme Court would overturn thelaw.

"The youth are being made to believe that sex before marriage is acceptable provided you know how to avoid pregnancy," wrote Archbishop Socrates Villegas, vice president of the bishops' conference, in a pastoral letter Sunday. "Is this moral? Those who corrupt the minds of children will invoke divine wrath on themselves."

ken.weiss@latimes.com

Weiss reported from Los Angeles and special correspondent Vanzi from Manila.

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Judge Denies Apple's Request to Ban 8 Samsung Phones

Samsung can continue selling eight smartphones, including the Galaxy S II, that infringed on Apple’s patents, a federal judge has ruled, handing the Korean company a small victory in its ongoing patent war with Apple.

It didn’t all go Samsung’s way, however. U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh also denied the company’s request for a retrial in the case, in which the two sides accused each other of infringing on patents. Apple claims Samsung copied the design of its iPhone and iPad and UI elements of iOS, while Samsung says the Cupertino company infringed on its 3G patents.

The tech giants have been fighting a patent war in courtrooms worldwide, and in August a nine-member jury in San Jose determined Samsung owed Apple more than $1 billion for infringing Apple’s patents. Koh will over the next month or so issue orders parsing the details of the verdict and consider, among other things, whether Apple will be awarded more, or less, than what the jury stipulated.

Koh issued her first big ruling late Monday, saying she will not grant an injunction barring the sale of eight Samsung phones because there is no evidence suggesting consumers specifically sought the features Samsung copied from Apple.

“Weighing all of the factors, the Court concludes that the principles of equity do not support
the issuance of an injunction here,” she wrote. “The fact that Apple may have lost customers and downstream sales to Samsung is not enough to justify an injunction. Apple must have lost these sales because Samsung infringed Apple’s patents.” [Emphasis included as appears in the order.]

Koh also reasoned that an injunction would not be in the public’s interest, and it’s not like Apple isn’t already going to be compensated handsomely for Samsung’s patent violations.

As for user interface IP infringement, Judge Koh wrote Tuesday: “Though Apple does have some interest in retaining certain features as exclusive to Apple, it does not follow that entire products must be forever banned from the market because they incorporate, among their myriad features, a few narrow protected functions… The fact that none of the patented features is core to the functionality of the accused products makes an injunction particularly inappropriate here.”

“The issue is that if Apple’s able to get an injunction even though features at issue only make up 1/1000 of the number of features of the phone, it potentially greatly exaggerates the value of the contribution that Apple’s patents actually make,” Notre Dame Law School professor Mark P. McKenna told Wired. “I was glad to see a court take that seriously. [Koh] basically said ‘These features maybe have some value, but they’re not the reason why people buy the Samsung phone, there are lots of other things.’”

McKenna said that the real interesting question is what will Judge Koh will do with the damages award as a result of this. He thinks it could go one of two ways: One interpretation is that she has indicated these patents are not worth very much to the value of Samsung’s products, and could thus knock down the $1 billion award to a smaller amount. Alternatively, it could indicate more of a tradeoff — That she believes the damages make Apple whole and will let the verdict stand, but simply is not giving it an injunction.

In a separate order, Koh declined Samsung’s request for a retrial, which the company filed amid claims the jury foreman, Vel Hogan, hid information from the court about his involvement in a lawsuit with Seagate, with whom Samsung has a “substantial strategic relationship.” She noted that Samsung had no complaints about the the jury’s handling of the case when deciding damages, so it can’t complain now.

“Samsung repeatedly praised the jury, noting the care, precision, and consistency with which the jury calculated damages based on trial damages evidence,” she wrote. “Samsung cannot credibly claim that the jury’s conduct was simultaneously worthy of such great praise and so biased as to warrant a new trial.”

Following a lengthy explanation citing a number of past cases, Koh said Hogan’s post-verdict statements shouldn’t be considered because of “the integrity of the jury system and the Federal Rules of Evidence.”

Judge Koh also issued an order Friday that she was declining to rule on Apple’s FRAND defenses against Samsung’s patents in the case. That is, Apple was hoping to make the patents Samsung asserted against Apple’s products unenforceable in future IP litigation. The jury found Apple didn’t infringe upon those patents in the first place, so Koh decided not to rule on the issue at this time.

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CBS dominates week in TV ratings

NEW YORK (AP) — CBS had little competition for dominance last week in the television ratings.

The network had 17 of the 25 most-watched programs on the air last week, according to the Nielsen company. It beat second-place NBC by an average of nearly four million viewers a night last week, and also took the 18-to-49-year-old demographic that advertisers seek.

“60 Minutes” and “NCIS” were the most popular shows on CBS last week. As is typical in the fall, NBC‘s Sunday night football matchup was the week’s most-watched show.

One end-of-year tradition, Barbara Walters‘ survey of the year’s most popular personalities, finished No. 27 in the week’s ratings with 7.6 million viewers.

On cable, Showtime’s “Dexter” and “Homeland” both hit series records for their season finale episodes on Sunday. “Dexter” had 2.8 million viewers and “Homeland” had 2.3 million. Showtime preceded each episode with a disclaimer, warning that audiences might find the shows too intense so soon after the Connecticut school killings.

CBS averaged 11.9 million viewers for the week in prime time (7.3 rating, 12 share). NBC had 7.3 million (4.5, 7), ABC had 5.1 million (3.3, 5), Fox had 4.4 million (2.7, 4), the CW had 1.7 million (1.1, 2) and ION Television had 1.3 million (0.9, 1).

Among the Spanish language networks, Univision led with an average of 3.2 million viewers (1.7, 3). Telemundo had 1.3 million (0.7, 1), TeleFutura had 850,000 (0.4, 1), Estrella had 340,000 (0.2, 0) and Azteca had 140,000 (0.1, 0).

NBC‘s “Nightly News” topped the evening newscasts with an average of 9.4 million viewers (6.3, 12). ABC’s “World News” was second with 8.3 million (5.5, 11) and the “CBS Evening News” had 7.2 million viewers (4.9, 9).

A ratings point represents 1,147,000 households, or 1 percent of the nation’s estimated 114.7 million TV homes. The share is the percentage of in-use televisions tuned to a given show.

For the week of Dec. 10-16, the top 10 shows, their networks and viewerships: NFL Football: San Francisco at New England, NBC, 23.23 million; “60 Minutes,” CBS, 19.63 million; “NCIS,” CBS, 17.65 million; “The Big Bang Theory,” CBS, 16.74 million; “NCIS: Los Angeles,” CBS, 15.12 million; “Sunday Night NFL Pre-Kick,” NBC, 14.62 million; “Person of Interest,” CBS, 14.08 million; “Two and a Half Men,” CBS, 13.34 million; “The Voice” (Monday), NBC, 12.33 million; “Criminal Minds,” CBS, 12.01 million.

___

ABC is owned by The Walt Disney Co. CBS is owned by CBS Corp. CW is a joint venture of Warner Bros. Entertainment and CBS Corp. Fox and My Network TV are units of News Corp. NBC and Telemundo are owned by Comcast Corp. ION Television is owned by ION Media Networks. TeleFutura is a division of Univision. Azteca America is a wholly owned subsidiary of TV Azteca S.A. de C.V.

___

Online:

http://www.nielsen.com

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Samsung Drops Action to Block Apple in Europe

PARIS — Samsung said Tuesday that it had dropped its request for a ban on sales of certain Apple phones and tablet computers in Europe, a sharp tactical turn in a patent war that the companies have been fighting on multiple fronts around the world.

Samsung, the South Korean electronics giant, had been seeking injunctions in a number of countries, including Britain, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, contending that Apple, Samsung’s biggest rival in the smartphone market, had infringed on Samsung patents.

The move came only a day after a ruling in a related case in San Francisco, where a U.S. District Court judge rejected a request by Apple, which is based in California, for an injunction to block sales of certain Samsung devices. The decision followed a previous jury ruling that Samsung had violated Apple patents.

After the latest twist in the European case, Samsung said it had acted “in the interest of protecting consumer choice.” Analysts said other factors might have been in play, including a possible nudge from the European Commission.

In January, the commission opened a formal antitrust investigation of Samsung’s terms for licensing patents covering wireless technologies. Under a previous agreement, Samsung had pledged to make the patents available to competitors on “fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory” terms.

“The scope of what was withdrawn precisely matches the area in which the European Commission has been investigating,” said Florian Müller, a patent consultant in Germering, Germany. “It’s not just that the plot is thickening; in my view, there can be no other plausible view than that there is pressure from Brussels.”

The commission had said previously that it was concerned about possible abuse of patents like the ones at issue in the Apple-Samsung injunction request, those covering technologies needed for a device to function. Without some of these “standard essential patents” from Samsung, for example, phones cannot connect to high-speed wireless networks.

“Regulators have been saying, if the patent holders try to abuse these patents, then they are going to get in trouble,” Mr. Müller said.

The commission declined to comment directly on whether there might be a link between Samsung’s announcement Tuesday and the antitrust case in Brussels. “We take note of this development,” said Antoine Colombani, the spokesman for the E.U. competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia. “Our investigation is ongoing.”

Samsung, meanwhile, said it could not comment on the proceedings. It said it was “fully co-operating with the European Commission.”

“Samsung remains committed to licensing our technologies on fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory terms, and we strongly believe it is better when companies compete fairly in the marketplace, rather than in court,” it said in a statement.

There has been speculation that Samsung and Apple have been in talks to try to reach a settlement, though the broad scale of the litigation between the two companies, with lawsuits seeking sales bans or damages continuing on several continents, could make that challenging.

“We cannot comment on details of ongoing legal proceedings, but we believe a commercial resolution is achievable,” Samsung said in a statement.

Alan Hely, a spokesman for Apple, declined to comment.

The announcement by Samsung does not end litigation between the two companies in Europe. Samsung said it planned to pursue lawsuits seeking damages from Apple for what it contends is patent infringement.

Apple and Samsung have also been battling over other patents, covering nonessential features of their devices, like design.

Apple, too, has previously secured bans on the sale of certain Samsung products. Last year, for example, a court in Düsseldorf ruled that Samsung could not sell one of its Galaxy tablet devices in Germany because it bore too close a resemblance to the iPad 2 from Apple.

While some analysts cited regulatory pressure as a possible reason for Samsung’s decision Tuesday, others said the company might have decided that the lawsuits were simply a distraction. Samsung’s phones, especially its Galaxy S3, have been selling well.

In the third quarter, the S3 surpassed the iPhone 4S to become the world’s best-selling smartphone, according to Strategy Analytics, a research firm.

“Maybe the market was telling them that they were succeeding and their time was better spent promoting sales of their product,” said Charles Golvin, an analyst at Forrester Research.

James Kanter contributed reporting from Brussels.

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NASA to crash GRAIL spacecraft into moon

Space fanatics and NASA obsessives: Clear your afternoon calendar.

At approximately 2:28 p.m. Monday, NASA will send its twin spacecrafts Ebb and Flow hurtling into the moon at 3,760 mph -- and the space agency will have a live play-by-play of the event, hosted by scientists in the control room at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge.

The live feed begins at 2 and ends around 2:30. Unfortunately, you will not be able to see the two crashes because the lunar crater that will be their final resting places will be in shadow at the time.

NASA scientists admit to feeling sad about the deliberate destruction of these two spacecraft. They were launched from Earth in September of 2011 to help scientists learn more about the lunar gravity field. Ebb and Flow completed their primary three-month mission, then went on to complete an extended mission as well.

But now they are in low orbit and running out of fuel. Since they can no longer make scientific measurements, it is time to say goodbye.

A bit more about Ebb and Flow:

They are part of the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory mission, better known as GRAIL.

Each is about the size of a washer-dryer you might find in an apartment. They worked in tandem to measure the lunar gravity field.

Thanks to their efforts, scientists have learned that the moon's crust is far thinner than they had originally thought. Additional findings should be released in the spring.

Ebb will go down first. Flow will follow about 20 seconds later, and land roughly 25 miles away.

NASA's live commentary will include interviews with GRAIL team members. You can tune in below.

Free live streaming by Ustream

Return to the Science Now blog.

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Anti-Google Crusader Slams Possible Deal in Antitrust Probe

A federal probe into Google’s search results could soon end with a settlement that largely keeps the U.S. government out of its business. But one of the search giant’s most vocal critics says that however toothless the potential deal, Google will not have escaped untouched just yet.

Silicon Valley attorney Gary Reback spent years dogging Microsoft, and U.S. authorities, as the Department of Justice pursued its antitrust case against Bill Gates’ company. He now represents clients he describes as specialty search engines that he says Google illegally stifles in its search results.

Reback tells Wired he hasn’t been able to confirm reports in Politico and elsewhere that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission would end its antitrust investigation in exchange for voluntary changes from Google. But he said any such agreement would mean a “complete institutional failure” on the part of the FTC to rectify what he describes as Google’s ravaging of the internet’s competitive landscape in recent years.

“There are some places where Google has been doing bad things for a very long time,” Reback says. “They have so badly damaged competition that if they just stopped right now, the damage has still been done.”

Google has long denied accusations that it games search results to quash competition and favor its own products and services. “We never take actions to hurt specific websites for competitive reasons,” the company says in a FAQ on its website. “Our search quality and ad quality systems assess the quality of web pages and ads without regard to whether a site competes with Google, only on the basis of what is useful for consumers.”

In response to questions about a possible deal with the FTC, a Google spokesperson would only say, “We continue to work cooperatively with the Federal Trade Commission and are happy to answer any questions they may have.”

An FTC spokesman declined to comment.

Even if a voluntary settlement does become official, Reback says that investigations by several state attorneys general and the European Union could still lead to a legal crackdown on Google. The Department of Justice could also intervene, as it did against Microsoft, he says.

Reback’s crusade against Google serves the business interests of his clients. But he also claims Google’s practices are having a chilling effect on nearly all startups that aspire to challenge its dominance, which hurts the economy as a whole by pushing the tech industry closer to the bad old days of telecom.

“We’ll end up like the phone company,” he says. “There will be a couple big companies, but that will be it.”

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