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The "Frequency" movie from the year 2000 with Jim Caviezel as John Sullivan, who, because of a giant solar flare, can speak with his dead father, Dennis Quaid, on his dad's ham radio, is coming back from the dead itself, returning as a CW television series this fall. This time, it is a father Riley Smith speaking through radio from the dead to daughter Peyton List. When radio was first invented at the turn of the 20th Century, there was a common belief that one could speak to the dead through radio airwaves.

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The Amateur Radio Relay League reports that the ARRL reached an agreement with the Community Associations Institute — the national association of homeowners associations — to amend the language of the Amateur Radio Parity Act, allowing H.R. 1301 to proceed in Congress this year. The Act was meant to allow amateur radio enthusiasts living in deed-restricted communities to install an effective outdoor antenna. The homeowners lobby, though, does not want to lose the power to enforce deed restrictions across the country. “We express support for H.R. 1301, the Amateur Radio Parity Act, as proposed to be amended,” a statement from the homeowners' association said. Locally, a representative for Rep. Chris Gibson told WGXC that the previous version of the bill has his support.

Barre Phillips, "Mountainscape Ⅴ" from "Mountainscapes" (ECM)

The Guardian has found in an investigation that new electronic gizmos such as Amazon's Echo violate the U.S. Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), set up to regulate the collection and use of personal information from anyone younger than 13. The story suggests companies such as Google, Apple, and others marketing artificial intelligence systems to young children could face multimillion-dollar fines. “This is part of the initial wave of marketing to children using the internet of things,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a privacy advocacy group that helped write the law. “It is exactly why the law was enacted in the first place, to protect young people from pervasive data collection.” The story says Google’s standalone Home device, just announced but not yet on sale, and Apple’s Siri, use young children and Cookie Monster from Sesame Street in their ads. “When your advertising markets this product to children, and parents with children, that would absolutely trigger COPPA,” says Khaliah Barnes, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. “Recording children in the privacy of the home is genuinely creepy, and this warrants additional investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and the states.” Amazon and Google claim they comply with COPPA, while an Apple spokesperson told The Guardian that the company complied and doesn’t target kids. Read the full story in The Guardian.

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Net neutrality may be an issue that's never settled. Courts have struck versions down in the past, and they may again in the future. The U.S. House of Representatives just passed the "No Rate Regulation of Broadband Internet Access Act," which would undermine the FCC's ability to enforce net neutrality rules, and is now in the U.S. Senate. The law is currently in effect, supposedly equalizing the internet for both home users and giant corporations, but the telecom companies have already found a way around it. Zero-rating is the latest loophole used by telecom companies to get around net neutrality rules with carriers exempting certain services, such as Spotify or Netflix, from a customer’s data plan. Net neutrality advocates say this gives certain types of data priority over others, when net neutrality is meant to create an even playing field for all. “Widely embraced, zero-rating threatens to rewrite the rules upon which the internet was built,” Electronic Frontier Foundation legal director Corynne McSherry told Gizmodo. “Zero-rating helps transform the internet from a permission-less environment... into one in which developers effectively need to seek approval from ISPs before deploying their latest groundbreaking technology.” This week 58 tech companies, -- Reddit, Yelp, Kickstarter, among them -- sent a letter to the FCC asking for an open discussion about zero-rating, as the agency is looking at the practice, but not holding public hearings.

Science Daily reports that researchers from the University of Stuttgart and the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF used radio transmission to send the contents of a conventional DVD in under ten seconds, setting a new world record in wireless data transmission. The transmission was clocked at 6 Gigabits per second over 37 kilometers between Cologne and the town of Wachtberg at 71-76 GHz in the so-called E band, regulated for terrestrial and satellite broadcasting. The researchers said they needed to use the millimeter waves of those frequencies to send the data so fast. The group used a highly directive parabolic antenna to send the signals, and say there are several applications for the technology. It could be used offload data from earth observation satellites down to earth, or the terrestrial radio transmissions in the E-band expand rural broadband, and has can be set up quickly for emergency broadcasts. Read the full story in Science Daily.

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Once upon a time, the few opponents in Congress to the low-power FM bill then pending in Washington D.C., made up a fake compact disc and distributed it to legislators, claiming it contained the sounds of interference that low-power stations would cause over the signals of much more powerful full-power stations. Of course, giant full-power FM stations would interfere with small low-power FM stations, if radio engineering was incorrect, not the other way around. Now that Congress has allowed two different low-power FM bills to pass, and thousands of stations to go on the air, Radio World reported May 12 that the Federal Communications Commission made their first ruling on this issue. A Birmingham, Ala. FM station, WDJC, raised repeated concerns about interference from three planned LPFMs stations, all with religious-based programming. Kimtron Inc., part of Crawford Broadcasting claimed their high-definition digital signals were endangered by the low-power stations, but the FCC did not buy that argument, and still, no one has proved that low-power FM stations interfere with full-power stations.

Pakistan on May 22 accused the United States of violating its sovereignty with a radio-controlled drone strike that reportedly killed the leader of the Afghan Taliban and a cab driver in a remote border area inside Pakistan. The president of Afghanistan announced the drone attack killed Mullah Akhtar Mansoor. U.S. officials said Barack Obama authorised the strike with multiple drones, and Pakistan said the U.S. government did not inform Nawaz Sharif, the prime minister, before the strike that U.S. drones were entering Pakistani airspace for the assault, and anonymous U.S. officials confirmed there was no warning. Meanwhile, U.S. Army chaplain Chris Antal has quit sending a May 6 letter of resignation to President Obama that said, "I refuse to support U.S. armed drone policy.... I refuse to support this policy of unaccountable killing." Antal says he saw drone aircraft lined to take off when he was at a military funeral service, and, he told Public Radio International, "My heart was opened to the pain of the loss of these American lives, but to hold that with the drones... to stand there wondering who we were killing, who their families were, and how they were grieving... it just created a break in my soul." The video above is Antal discussing how the military kicked him out of Afghanistan for his views on the radio-controlled drones.

Bobby Previte and the Visitors, "Live in Europe," live from Club Moods in Zurich, Switzerland, January 25, 2016. Michael Gamble, guitar, Michael Kammers, tenor saxophone, organ, piano, Kurt Kotheimer, bass, Bobby Previte, drums.

John Anderson in DIYMedia.net, after the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, looks at the big-picture with radio. While television broadcasters are about to make a bundle selling off spectrum, the radio industry is hearing lots of bad news recently. iHeartMedia is staving off angry bond-holders over its several billion dollars’ worth of its debt, while the next biggest radio company, Cumulus Media, is fighting off bankruptcy. Emmis may be delisting by NASDAQ in early June. And CBS is spinning off its entire radio division, and might sell. The collapse of the radio conglomerates may mean some major industry sea-change, Anderson posits. And future-thinkers are wondering if radio is keeping up with multi-platform interactivity, and, if cars become driverless, listeners will be even more distracted by thousands of other options. (Anderson is on Wave Farm's board.)

The Indiana University Libraries announced May 3 a $25,000 grant from the National Recording Preservation Foundation to preserve rare, original recordings of "The Orson Welles Show," the live radio series produced beginning Sept. 15, 1941. The university says that internet chatter seems to indicate only eight of the 19 shows in circulation, but Indiana U. says they will restore 14 original lacquer discs, and other supposedly lost recordings. The university will create a website for the recordings, where users will be able to stream audio, search Welles' scripts, and access expert commentary. Mike Casey, IU's director of technical operations for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative, said they have 324 lacquer discs and about 100 accompanying paper scripts from old radio shows. "Most lacquer discs have an aluminum or glass base with a black lacquer coating," he said. "It contains the grooves that carry the sound. This is not a safe way to store a treasure -- lacquer discs are inherently chemically unstable and sometimes fail catastrophically."

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The Atlantic magazine reports that there are some days in Iraq when students have tests in school, and the country's entire Internet is shut down. For the second year in a row the government ordered Iraqi telecom companies to shut down to the Internet to prevent cheating, according to human-rights groups. An Internet analytics company called Dyn logged a pattern of three-hour long blackouts during the testing period there. Access Now, a digital rights advocacy group, reports that there have been 12 government-mandated Internet blackouts around the planet this year. Uzbekistan’s government also shut down the internet during school exams in 2014, and the same thing happened this year in Gujarat, a state in northwest India. But, usually, unrest or elections are the reasons behind Internet shutdowns.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo was called out by HBO's John Oliver May 15, for diverting funds meant to maintain and improve the 911 emergency call system. On his "Last Week Tonight" television show, Oliver also mentioned that New York is one of the few states that do not coordinate their county 911 call centers statewide. And nationwide, Facebook or the Domino's pizza app can tell exactly where your cell phone is calling from, but 911 operators are not getting that information, and emergency victims are left waiting while responders spend time figuring out where victims are located.

David Oxenford in the Broadcast Law Blog reports the Federal Commuications Commission begins requiring commercial radio stations to upload documents and make their public files available online. The requirement begins June 24, but just in the Top 50 radio markets, and only for stations with five or more full-time employees. The station has their license, public comments, records of political ads, their EEO Public Inspection File Reports, and Quarterly Issues Programs Lists, and other documents for the public can evaluate in these files. Read the full story in the Broadcast Law Blog.

Martijn Comes, "Radio Oblivion"



Kristin Kontrol, "X-Communicate" (Sub Pop). Dee Dee from Dum Dum Girls performs at BSP in Kingston on June 15.



Vox Urbana, "Cuentan Los Cerros"

Gizmodo reports that Senator Ron Wyden will introduce legislation next week that would roll back the government's new broader hacking power granted by the Supreme Court in April. The "Rule 41" allows federal judges to grant warrants to the FBI to use what they call “Network Investigative Techniques.” Anyone who has had their computer invaded would call that malware, and the government can use that malware on 10 or 10,000 computers, no matter the jurisdiction of those computers. And the rule allows judges to give warrants to search the computers of victims of cybercrime, even if that person isn't a suspect. “By compromising computer systems, it could leave it open to other attackers. What if the government has to turn off the computer’s protections to search it?,” Wyden told Gizmodo. “So if the government is out there turning of millions of security features in order to search computers, my view is that there could be some serious security threats.” Wyden's legislation will be just one sentence, saying that the changes to rule 41 will not go into effect. Congress has six months to pass such a measure before the rule change takes effect.

Photo from lawanddisorder.com

The New York Times reported that Michael Ratner, the civil liberties lawyer who also hosted the "Law and Disorder" radio show (which originated on WBAI and airs on WGXC at 10 a.m. Mondays), died May 11 from complications of cancer, according to his brother, Bruce, the property developer and an owner of the Brooklyn Nets. Ratner, 72, may be best known for successfully challenging the United States government’s detention of terrorism suspects at Guantánamo Bay without judicial review. He also headed the Center for Constitutional Rights, and sued New York City to end wholesale stop-and-frisk policing. "Law and Disorder," with co-hosts Heidi Boghosian and Michael Steven Smith is a weekly syndicated radio program discussing access to rare (on the radio) legal perspectives on issues concerning civil liberties, privacy, the right to dissent, and torture.

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Slate reports that last week four U.S. Senators sent a letter critical of the ConnectHome program that is supposed to help rural Americans get broadband internet service to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which runs ConnectHome. Sens. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.V.; Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y.; Angus King, I-Maine; and Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., complained about the quality of the Internet that ConnectHome provides. ConnectHome sets up 4Mbps download and 1Mbps as broadband, though the Federal Communications Commission recently updated those figures to 25Mbps download speed and 3Mbps upload speed in January 2015. "Federal policymakers must ensure that taxpayer-supported infrastructure is sufficiently robust to handle demand. It is not only a matter of fairness that rural Americans can fully utilize broadband-enabled resources, but also a matter of ensuring that taxpayers are receiving the full economic development return on their investments," the senators wrote to the Agriculture Department. The FCC's Lifeline program for low-income Americans provides 10Mbps downloads. Most government internet subsidies, Slate reports, set aside $9.25 per household for broadband, which won't get anyone blazing internet speeds.

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Gizmodo pulls back the curtain on the supposedly neutral, computer-based algorithm of "trending" news on Facebook, which turns out to be none of those things. The site interviewed several former contract workers for Facebook who were curators, chosen to pick which stories Facebook features as trending news who said they were told to increase the profile of certain stories, and to ignore others that were popular among users. "In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists 'topics that have recently become popular on Facebook,'" Gizmodo wrote. The story's allegations that conservative news was played down by Facebook seems less impressive. One anonymous former Facebook news curator says, “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.” That sounds like a problem in any newsroom, not particular to Facebook. Another quote says, “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased." Did they follow the same procedure with first-sources from the far left? Probably the curators searched for more sources, and sources they knew and could trust, just like regular journalists. Facebook's news curation may have a bias against conservative news, and tends towards mainstream sources and stories, just like many other news outlets, and that part of the story seems very accurate. See the full story in Gizmodo.

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Boing Boing reports that the U.S. Navy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, DARPA, now have a radio-controlled drone for the seas. The Navy's first ship without an on-board crew is a 132-foot Antisubmarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel called Sea Hunter, which cost around $120 million to build. The military claims new editions will only cost $20 million, and will be used to track enemy submarines, and will be testing off the California coast the next two years, starting with on-board personnel, just in case of some sort of failure over the radio waves.