January 9 ended up being a very expensive day for a Culver City, California man after he pleaded guilty to recklessly operating a drone during the height of the Pacific Palisades wildfire. We covered this story a bit when it happened (second item), which resulted in the drone striking and damaging the leading edge of a Canadian “Super Scooper” plane that was trying to fight the fire. Peter Tripp Akemann, 56, admitted to taking the opportunity to go to the top of a parking garage in Santa Monica and launching his drone to get a better view of the action to the northwest. Unfortunately, the drone got about 2,500 meters away, far beyond visual range and, as it turns out, directly in the path of the planes refilling their tanks by skimming along the waters off Malibu. The agreement between Akemann and federal prosecutors calls for a guilty plea along with full restitution to the government of Quebec, which owns the damaged plane, plus the costs of repair. Akemann needs to write a check for $65,169 plus perform 150 hours of community service related to the relief effort for the fire’s victims. Expensive, yes, but probably better than the year in federal prison such an offense could have earned him.

Another story we’ve been following for a while is the United States government’s effort to mandate that every car sold here comes equipped with an AM radio. The argument is that broadcasters, at the government’s behest, have devoted a massive amount of time and money to bulletproofing AM radio, up to and including providing apocalypse-proof bunkers for selected stations, making AM radio a vital part of the emergency communications infrastructure. Car manufacturers, however, have been routinely deleting AM receivers from their infotainment products, arguing that nobody but boomers listen to AM radio in the car anymore. This resulted in the “AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act,” which enjoyed some support the first time it was introduced but still failed to pass. The bill has been reintroduced and appears to be on a fast track to approval, both in the Senate and the House, where a companion bill was introduced this week. As for the “AM is dead” argument, the Geerling boys put the lie to that by noting that the Arbitron ratings for AM stations around Los Angeles spiked dramatically during the recent wildfires. AM might not be the first choice for entertainment anymore, but while things start getting real, people know where to go.

Most of us are probably familiar with the concept of a honeypot, which is a system set up to entice black hat hackers with the promise of juicy information but instead traps them. It’s a time-honored security tactic, but one that relies on human traits like greed and laziness to work. Protecting yourself against non-human attacks, like those coming from bots trying to train large language models on your content, is a different story. That’s where you might want to look at something like Nepenthes, a tarpit service intended to slow down and confuse the hell out of LLM bots. Named after a genus of carnivorous pitcher plants, Nepenthes traps bots with a two-pronged attack. First, the service generates a randomized but deterministic wall of text that almost but not quite reads like sensible English. It also populates a bunch of links for the bots to follow, all of which point right back to the same service, generating another page of nonsense text and self-referential links. Ingeniously devious; use with caution, of course.

When was the last time you actually read a Terms of Service document? If you’re like most of us, the closest you’ve ever come is the few occasions where you’ve got to scroll to the bottom of a text window before the “Accept Terms” button is enabled. We all know it’s not good to agree to something legally binding without reading it, but who has time to trawl through all that legalese? Nobody we know, which is where ToS; DR comes in. “Terms of Service; Didn’t Read” does the heavy lifting of ToS and EULAs for you, providing a summary of what you’re agreeing to as well as an overall grade from A to E, with E being the lowest. Refreshingly, the summaries and ratings are not performed by some LLM but rather by volunteer reviewers, who pore over the details so you don’t have to. Talk about taking one for the team.

And finally, how many continents do you think there are? Most of us were taught that there are seven, which would probably come as a surprise to an impartial extraterrestrial, who would probably say there’s a huge continent in one hemisphere, a smaller one with a really skinny section in the other hemisphere, the snowy one at the bottom, and a bunch of big islands. That’s not how geologists see things, though, and new research into plate tectonics suggests that the real number might be six continents. So which continent is getting the Pluto treatment? Geologists previously believed that the European plate fully separated from the North American plate 52 million years ago, but recent undersea observations in the arc connecting Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands suggest that the plate is still pulling apart. That would make Europe and North America one massive continent, at least tectonically. This is far from a done deal, of course; more measurements will reveal if the crust under the ocean is still stretching out, which would support the hypothesis. In the meantime, Europe, enjoy your continental status while you still can.

The big news story of the week of course has been the wildfires in California, which as of Saturday have burned over 30,000 acres, destroyed 12,000 structures, caused 150,000 people to evacuate, and killed eleven people. Actually, calling them wildfires underplays the situation a bit because there are places where they’ve clearly become firestorms, burning intensely enough to create their own winds, consuming everything in their path in a horrific positive feedback loop. We’ve even seen fire tornados caught on video. We’ve got quite a few connections to the affected area, both personally and professionally, not least of which are all our Supplyframe colleagues in Pasadena, who are under immediate threat from the Eaton fire. We don’t know many details yet, but we’ve heard that some have lost homes. We’ve also got friends at the Jet Propulsion Labs, which closed a few days ago to all but emergency personnel. The fire doesn’t seem to have made it down the mountain yet, but it’s very close as of Saturday noon.

Unfortunately, there’s not much any of us can do except watch and wait and hope for the best. But there is one thing we can not do, and that’s try to fly our drones around to get some video of the fire. That’s probably what some knucklehead was up to when a Canadian aerial tanker fighting the Pallisades fire sustained wing damage from a drone strike. The drone apparently hit the leading edge of one wing on the Canadair CL-145 Super Scooper, caving it in and grounding the plane. Taking an indispensable aerial asset like that out of the fight and endangering the lives of the crew and the firefighters working on the ground in close proximity to it is unforgivable, and the culprits better hope the authorities catch up to them before the justifiably angry victims of the fire do.

Speaking of other things not to do during a wildfire, you might want to think twice before keying up that Baofeng to call in a custom aerial water attack. That’s what the Federal Communications Commission accuses an Idaho amateur radio operator of doing during a 2021 fire near Elk River, Idaho, a stunt that’s going to cost him a cool $34,000 in fines. The FCC recently issued a forfeiture order that affirms the original judgment against Jason Frawley (WA7CQ). Our friend Josh (KI6NAZ) over at Ham Radio Crash Course has a great rundown on the FCC ruling and its implications, but the short story is that Frawley operated a radio outside of the bands he’s licensed to use to talk to US Forest Service aerial assets, apparently to call in a water drop in the area of a mountaintop repeater site. This created a dangerous enough situation that the incident commander left the fireground to find him and tell him to stop. Forest Service law enforcement officers later found Frawley and interviewed him, whereupon he admitted making the transmissions but said he was only trying to help. The FCC didn’t buy it, so now he’s on the hook for a huge fine. The lesson is simple — the FCC doesn’t mess around with enforcement, especially where public safety is involved.

On to more pleasant distractions! We got a tip on a fun website called Atlas of Space that you’ll want to check out. It’s an interactive visualization of the solar system which lets you see the current orbital locations of pretty much all the interesting stuff going around the sun. You can control which classes of objects are displayed, from the inner planets to the trans-Neptunian objects. There’s even a callout for Elon’s Roadster, which is currently outside the orbit of Mars, in case you wanted to know. The thing that’s nice is that you can control the view in three dimensions, which makes it easy to appreciate the complexity of our system. We never realized just how weird Pluto’s orbit was; it’s highly elliptical and very steeply inclined relative to the ecliptic. And that’s another thing — the plane of the ecliptic isn’t all that planar. The universe is a messy place, and our little corner of it is quite a bit more untidy than simple textbook illustrations would lead you to believe.

And finally, while a lot of progress has been made in making public places accessible to people in wheelchairs, there can still be significant barriers once they get inside a place. One we never thought of was the laboratory, where wheelchair users can face a slew of problems. Chief among them can be finding effective PPE like lab coats, which as any “lab rat” can tell you aren’t the easiest garments to sit down in. To remedy that, a group at University College London has come up with a prototype lab coat adapted for wheelchair use. It’s not clear what the modifications are, but if we had to guess we’d say it’s more or less a standard lab coat with the tails cut off, making it more like an apron from the waist down. The design group is currently testing the prototype and needs people to give it a try, so if you’re a wheelchair user working in a lab, drop them a line and let them know what you think.