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A federal appeals court today reversed a ruling that prevented New York from enforcing a law requiring Internet service providers to sell $15 broadband plans to low-income consumers. The ruling is a loss for six trade groups that represent ISPs, although it isn't clear right now whether the law will be enforced.

New York's Affordable Broadband Act (ABA) was blocked in June 2021 by a US District Court judge who ruled that the state law is rate regulation and preempted by federal law. Today, the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit reversed the ruling and vacated the permanent injunction that barred enforcement of the state law.

For consumers who qualify for means-tested government benefits, the state law requires ISPs to offer "broadband at no more than $15 per month for service of 25Mbps, or $20 per month for high-speed service of 200Mbps," the ruling noted. The law allows for price increases every few years and makes exemptions available to ISPs with fewer than 20,000 customers.

"First, the ABA is not field-preempted by the Communications Act of 1934 (as amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996), because the Act does not establish a framework of rate regulation that is sufficiently comprehensive to imply that Congress intended to exclude the states from entering the field," a panel of appeals court judges stated in a 2-1 opinion.

Trade groups claimed the state law is preempted by former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai's repeal of net neutrality rules. Pai's repeal placed ISPs under the more forgiving Title I regulatory framework instead of the common-carrier framework in Title II of the Communications Act.

2nd Circuit judges did not find this argument convincing:

Second, the ABA is not conflict-preempted by the Federal Communications Commission's 2018 order classifying broadband as an information service. That order stripped the agency of its authority to regulate the rates charged for broadband Internet, and a federal agency cannot exclude states from regulating in an area where the agency itself lacks regulatory authority. Accordingly, we REVERSE the judgment of the district court and VACATE the permanent injunction.

Be careful what you lobby for

The judges' reasoning is similar to what a different appeals court said in 2019 when it rejected Pai's attempt to preempt all state net neutrality laws. In that case, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said that "in any area where the Commission lacks the authority to regulate, it equally lacks the power to preempt state law." In a related case, ISPs were unable to block a California net neutrality law.

Several of the trade groups that sued New York "vociferously lobbied the FCC to classify broadband Internet as a Title I service in order to prevent the FCC from having the authority to regulate them," today's 2nd Circuit ruling said. "At that time, Supreme Court precedent was already clear that when a federal agency lacks the power to regulate, it also lacks the power to preempt. The Plaintiffs now ask us to save them from the foreseeable legal consequences of their own strategic decisions. We cannot."

Judges noted that there are several options for ISPs to try to avoid regulation:

If they believe a requirement to provide Internet to low-income families at a reduced price is unfair or misguided, they have several pathways available to them. They could take it up with the New York State Legislature. They could ask Congress to change the scope of the FCC's Title I authority under the Communications Act. They could ask the FCC to revisit its classification decision, as it has done several times before But they cannot ask this Court to distort well-established principles of administrative law and federalism to strike down a state law they do not like.

Coincidentally, the 2nd Circuit issued its opinion one day after current FCC leadership reclassified broadband again in order to restore net neutrality rules. ISPs might now have a better case for preempting the New York law. The FCC itself won't necessarily try to preempt New York's law, but the agency's net neutrality order does specifically reject rate regulation at the federal level.

Ruling important for state authority, professor says

Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick said today's ruling provides states with important protections in the event that the FCC ever deregulates broadband again. "Today's decision means that if a future FCC again decided to abdicate its oversight over broadband like it did in 2017, the states have strong legal precedent, across circuits, to institute their own protections or re-activate dormant ones," she said.

Combined with other rulings like the one upholding California's net neutrality law, van Schewick says that "case law is now abundantly clear that if the FCC eliminates its authority over broadband by miscategorizing it as a Title I information service, then the states can step in."

Andrew Jay Schwartzman, senior counselor for the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, said that "today's decision holds that FCC regulations do not interfere with the states' ability to ensure that their residents have affordable access... This decision provides a roadmap for other states to follow to join New York in doing what the federal government has thus far failed to do."

The dissenting judge in today's 2nd Circuit ruling, Richard Sullivan, wrote that the state law "is field-preempted because the Communications Act preempts all rate regulation of interstate communication services. By its text, the Communications Act grants the FCC authority over 'all interstate' communication services—save for a limited set of state-law prohibitions—while leaving to the states the power to regulate intrastate communications."

States have the power to enforce consumer protection laws. But because "rate regulation was not one of those traditional spheres of state authority, only the FCC retains the authority to regulate rates of interstate communications," he wrote.

Lobby groups disappointed

Sullivan also argued that the appeals court lacks jurisdiction. "After New York was preliminarily enjoined from enforcing the ABA, it stipulated to judgment against it, and then appealed that stipulated judgment. This was a strategic move," Sullivan wrote.

This tactic "is generally not permitted as a shortcut to appellate review," Sullivan wrote. However, the majority decided that the court has "appellate jurisdiction because the district court plainly rejected the legal basis for New York's preemption defenses, all claims have been disposed of with prejudice, the stipulation was designed solely to obtain immediate appellate review and does not circumvent restrictions on our appellate jurisdiction, and New York expressly preserved the right to appeal."

The lobby groups that sued New York issued a joint statement saying they "are disappointed by the court's decision and New York state's move for rate regulation in competitive industries. It not only discourages the needed investment in our nation's infrastructure, but also potentially risks the sustainability of broadband operations in many areas."

The groups that sued New York are the New York State Telecommunications Association; CTIA; America's Communications Association (formerly the American Cable Association); USTelecom; NTCA-The Rural Broadband Association; and the Satellite Broadcasting and Communications Association. The groups could seek a rehearing before all 2nd Circuit judges or appeal to the Supreme Court. They could also seek preemption on the basis of the FCC's more recent decision to classify broadband under Title II.

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At long last, the NFL Draft finally has gotten underway from the city of Detroit. The first round is officially in the books, and each of the 32 selections bring a renewed sense of hope to the franchises that made those picks. But plenty of work remains. Rounds 2 and 3 take place Friday night, and then Saturday features Rounds 4 through 7. It’ll take some time to see how these picks pan out, but that won’t stop us from reacting and analyzing. We’re taking a look at the winners and losers of the first round. Quarterbacks — Quarterbacks flew off the board Thursday night with six of them...

Enlarge / Imaging setup for a charred ancient papyrus recovered from the ruins of Herculaneum; 30 percent of the text has now been deciphered. (credit: CNR – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche)

Historical accounts vary about how the Greek philosopher Plato died: in bed while listening to a young woman playing the flute; at a wedding feast; or peacefully in his sleep. But the few surviving texts from that period indicate that the philosopher was buried somewhere in the garden of the Academy he founded in Athens. The garden was quite large, but archaeologists have now deciphered a charred ancient papyrus scroll recovered from the ruins of Herculaneum, indicating a more precise burial location: in a private area near a sacred shrine to the Muses, according to Constanza Millani, director of the Institute of Heritage Science at Italy's National Research Council.

As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort town Pompeii wasn't the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived. One palatial residence in Herculaneum—believed to have once belonged to a man named Piso—contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas.

The scrolls stayed buried under volcanic mud until they were excavated in the 1700s from a single room that archaeologists believe held the personal working library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. There may be even more scrolls still buried on the as-yet-unexcavated lower floors of the villa. The few opened fragments helped scholars identify various Greek philosophical texts, including On Nature by Epicurus and several by Philodemus himself, as well as a handful of Latin works. But the more than 600 rolled-up scrolls were so fragile that it was long believed they would never be readable, since even touching them could cause them to crumble.

Scientists have brought all manner of cutting-edge tools to bear on deciphering badly damaged ancient texts like the Herculaneum scrolls. For instance, in 2019, German scientists used a combination of physics techniques (synchrotron radiation, infrared spectroscopy, and X-ray fluorescence) to virtually "unfold" an ancient Egyptian papyrus.

Brent Searles' lab at the University of Kentucky has been working on deciphering the Herculaneum scrolls for many years. He employs a different method of "virtually unrolling" damaged scrolls, using digital scanning with micro-computed tomography—a noninvasive technique often used for cancer imaging—with segmentation to digitally create pages, augmented with texturing and flattening techniques. Then they developed software (Volume Cartography) to virtually unroll the scroll.

The older Herculaneum scrolls were written with carbon-based ink (charcoal and water), so one would not get the same fluorescing in the CT scans, but the scans can still capture minute textural differences indicating those areas of papyrus that contained ink compared to the blank areas, and it's possible to train an artificial neural network to do just that.

This latest work is under the auspices of the "GreekSchools" project, funded by the European Research Council, which began three years ago and will continue through 2026. This time around, scholars have used infrared, ultraviolet optical imaging, thermal imaging, tomography, and digital optical microscopy as a kind of "bionic eye" to examine Philodemus' History of the Academy scroll, which was also written in carbon-based ink. Nonetheless, they were able to extract over 1,000 words, approximately 30 percent of the scroll's text, revealing new details about Plato's life as well as his place of burial.

Most notably, the historical account of Plato being sold into slavery in his later years after running afoul of the tyrannical Dionysius is usually pegged to around 387 BCE. According to the newly deciphered Philodemus text, however, Plato's enslavement may have occurred as early as 404 BCE or shortly after the death of Socrates in 399 BCE.

"Compared to previous editions, there is now an almost radically changed text, which implies a series of new and concrete facts about various academic philosophers," Graziano Ranocchia, lead researcher on the project, said. "Through the new edition and its contextualization, scholars have arrived at unexpected interdisciplinary deductions for ancient philosophy, Greek biography and literature, and the history of the book.”

Other deciphering efforts are also still underway. For instance, last fall we reported on the use of machine learning to decipher the first letters from a previously unreadable ancient scroll found in an ancient Roman villa at Herculaneum—part of the 2023 Vesuvius Challenge. And earlier this year tech entrepreneur and challenge co-founder Nat Friedman announced via X (formerly Twitter) that they had awarded the grand prize of $700,000 for producing the first readable text.

When the Vesuvius Challenge co-founders started the challenge, they thought there was less than a 30 percent chance of success within the year since, at the time, no one had been able to read actual letters inside of a scroll. However, the crowdsourcing approach proved wildly successful. That said, it's still just 5 percent of a single scroll.

So there is a new challenge for 2024: $100,000 for the first entry that can read 90 percent of the four scrolls scanned thus far. The primary goal is to perfect the auto-segmentation process since doing so manually is both time-consuming and expensive (more than $100 per square centimeter). This will lay the foundation for one day being able to scan and read all 800 scrolls discovered so far, as well as any additional scrolls that are unearthed should the remaining levels of the villa finally be excavated.

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Enlarge / Ubuntu has come a long way over nearly 20 years, to the point where you can now render 3D Ubuntu coffee mugs and family pictures in a video announcing the 2024 spring release. (credit: Canonical)

History might consider the most important aspect of Ubuntu 24.04 to be something that it doesn't have: vulnerabilities to the XZ backdoor that nearly took over the global Linux scene.

Betas, and the final release of Ubuntu 24.04, a long-term support (LTS) release of the venerable Linux distribution, were delayed, as backing firm Canonical worked in early April 2024 to rebuild every binary included in the release. xz Utils, an almost ubiquitous data-compression package on Unix-like systems, had been compromised through a long-term and elaborate supply-chain attack, discovered only because a Microsoft engineer noted some oddities with SSH performance on a Debian system. Ubuntu, along with just about every other regularly updating software platform, had a lot of work to do this month.

What is actually new in Ubuntu 24.04, or "Noble Numbat?" Quite a bit, especially if you're the type who sticks to LTS releases. The big new changes are a very slick new installer, using the same Subiquity back-end as the Server releases, and redesigned with a whole new front-end in Flutter. ZFS encryption is back as a default install option, along with hardware-backed (i.e., TPM) full-disk encryption, plus more guidance for people looking to dual-boot with Windows setups and BitLocker. Netplan 1.0 is the default network configuration tool now. And the default installation is "Minimal," as introduced in 23.10.

Raspberry Pi gets some attention, too, with an edition of 24.04 (64-bit only) available for the popular single-board computer, including the now-supported Raspberry Pi 5 model. That edition includes power supply utility Pemmican and enables 3D acceleration in the Firefox Snap. Ubuntu also tweaked the GNOME (version 46) desktop included in this release, such that it should see better performance on Raspberry Pi graphics drivers.

What else? Lots of little things:

• Support for autoinstall, i.e., YAML-based installation workflows
• A separate, less background-memory-eating firmware updating tool
• Additional support for Group Policy Objects (GPOs) in Active Directory environments
• Security improvements to Personal Package Archives (PPA) software setups
• Restrictions to unprivileged user namespace through apparmor, which may impact some third-party apps downloaded from the web
• A new Ubuntu App Center, replacing the Snap Store that defaults to Snaps but still offers traditional .deb installs (and numerous angles of critique for Snap partisans)
• Firefox is a native Wayland application, and Thunderbird is a Snap package only
• More fingerprint reader support
• Improved Power Profiles Manager, especially for portable AMD devices
• Support for Apple's preferred HEIF/HEIC files, with thumbnail previews
• Snapshot replaces Cheese, and GNOME games has been removed
• Virtual memory mapping changes that make many modern games run better through Proton, per OMG Ubuntu
• Linux kernel 6.8, which, among other things, improves Intel Meteor Lake CPU performance and supports Nintendo Switch Online controllers.

The suggested system requirements for Ubuntu 24.04 are a 2 GHz dual-core processor, 4GB memory, and 25GB free storage space. There is a dedicated WSL edition of 24.04 out for Windows systems.

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Substacker Elle Griffin plowed through the transcripts of the Penguin Random House/Simon & Schuster projected merger antitrust trial, which somebody published in book form (ironic), and extracted a lot of stats.

Here’s the general picture:

(1) The overwhelming majority of books published by major publishing houses generate little or no money for anyone, and in particular their authors.

(2) Relatedly, books that sell more than [incredibly depressing number] copies are very rare. The DOJ collected data on more than 58,000 titles published in a year, and found that 90% sold less than 2,000 copies, and that the median number of sales was . . . twelve.

(3) The overwhelming bulk of book sales come from three classes of writers (or “writers”): celebrities, franchise authors (Stephen King, John Grisham, Colleen Hoover etc.,) and the backlist, that is, The Lord of the Rings, The Very Hungry Caterpillar, the Bible, etc. If you’re not an author who is already in one of these three categories, your chances of making a living by publishing books are infinitesimal.

(4) The big publishing houses now spend almost all their money on a tiny number of gigantic advances. Even authors who get these get almost no money spent on publicity efforts by their publishers, because the giant advances go to people with a million TikTok followers (see point #3).

(5) The Obamas sell so many books that they had to be taken out of the data analysis as distorting outliers.

(6) If/when book publishing goes to a Netflix/Spotify subscription model, where you pay $10 a month to read as many books as you want, traditional publishing will be destroyed, since 20% of book buyers spend 80% of the money spent on books (this is the ratio for basically everything in the universe, as I believe Pareto or some other annoying economist pointed out).

(7) It’s not unusual for a celebrity author to get a million dollar advance and then put their name on a book that doesn’t sell any copies. Big publishing is a boom or bust/lottery ticket/VC investment model, which is increasingly untenable. (Funny not like a clown side note: Marie Kondo published a book on how to keep your office tidy. In March 2020).

Parallels with the contemporary music industry are obvious and dire.

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