Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | RichLegg)

The coronavirus pandemic caused big ISPs to put data caps on hold for a few months, but one small ISP is going a big step further and canceling the arbitrary monthly limits permanently. Antietam Broadband, which serves Washington County in Maryland, announced Friday that it "has permanently removed broadband data usage caps for all customers," retroactive to mid-March when the company first temporarily suspended data-cap overage fees.

The decision to permanently drop the cap was made partly because of "learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic as more people worked and learned remotely," Antietam explained. "During this period customers moved into broadband packages that more accurately reflected their broadband needs." Like most other ISPs, Antietam charges different prices based on speed tiers as measured in bits per second, with Antietam's advertised download speeds ranging up to 1Gbps.

"These are uncertain times. We felt a need to give customers as much certainty over their bill as possible," Antietam President Brian Lynch said in the press release. "Eliminating data usage caps means that customers will know the exact amount of their broadband bill every month."

Enlarge

Over the past month, seemingly spontaneous protest sites have popped up throughout the country that advocate for an end to lockdowns various states have mandated in an attempt to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Now, security researchers have tied much of this seemingly grassroots activity to a single person.

Aaron Dorr is a well-known activist and lobbyist who has long been known for his advocacy of firearms ownership. Over a five-hour span on April 8, he registered six domains—reopenohio.com, reopenpa.com, reopenmn.com, reopeniowa.com, reopenwyoming.com, and reopenmissouri.com—and nine days later purchased reopentxnow.com.

He and his brothers then used a variety of state-specific Facebook groups, which according to the Des Moines Register have a total of more than 200,000 followers, to drive massive amounts of traffic to the newly registered addresses. In turn, the domains redirected visitors to a host of state-specific gun advocacy sites, such as Iowa Gun Owners. Each gun ownership site used a different organization name and prominently displayed banners decrying the lockdowns in their respective states.

Colonial Car, Chevrolet Nova 230, Hoboken, NJ, 1975

“Walking from a friend’s apartment at the end of an evening back to my place, I began to see curious things inside the cars on the street, like a tire nestled like a passenger in the front seat,” photographer Langdon Clay tells Road & Track. “Then I studied the cars themselves, their design details. Finally I stepped physically (and mentally) back a bit to regard the whole scene—a background field with a foreground vehicle. When those two elements clicked—in color, or light, or design—then I knew I was on to something… I looked for cars that would fit with and work with the background. Or the reverse, cars that clashed and looked out of place with where they were parked.

There’s fun to be had in spotting patterns and things that just go together. Michelle Maguire and Kelsey McClellan’s Wardrobe Snacks paired food with fashion. Here Langdon shows us America’s 1970s signature cars, the long, wide ones with their own Zip codes, in their natural habitats. Between 1976 and 1978, Langdon walked the street of New York city and nearby Hoboken, New Jersey, with an eye for parked cars that went with their settling and buffed by neon light. “They were all there, motionless, quietly parked. They were staring at me, standing still at the foot of the buildings. Side by side, as if they could create a kind of geographical and imaginary map of this city that I have loved so much.”

Subway Impala, Chevrolet Impala, 7th Avenue and 29th Street, 1975
FacebookTwitterPinterest

24 Checker car, Checker Marathon, in the Twenties near 6th Avenue, 1975

Orange Ghia, Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, west of meatpacking district, 1975

Masking-tape car, Brougham, West Village, 1976

MHT Gremlin, West Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, 1975

Spirit of ’76 car, Dodge Dart Light, Lower Chelsea, 1976.

Kojak cop car, Plymouth Fury, in the Twenties garment district, 1975

Eigen Supply car, Buick Centurion Convertible, Twenty-fourth Street near Sixth Avenue, 1976

Lobby car, Rambler Classic, 1250 Avenue of the Americas, 1976

Marlin Room car, Cutlass Supreme in front of Marlin Room and Lounge connected to Clam Broth House, Hoboken, New Jersey, 1975

Plymouth Duster, 1974

Fountain car, Oldsmobile Cutlass, 1975

White Tower car, Buick LeSabre, Meatpacking District, 1976.

King’s Inn Car, Chevrolet Caprice, Hoboken, NJ, 1975

Via: Cars – New York City 1974-1976 by Langdon Clay, is published by Steidl, Polka Gallery, Paris.

Enlarge / NAIROBI, Feb. 21, 2020—A swarm of desert locusts invade parts of Mwingi Town in Kitui County, Kenya, Feb. 20, 2020. (credit: Xinhua News Agency | Getty Images)

As the coronavirus pandemic exploded across the world earlier this year, another even more conspicuous plague was tearing through East Africa: locusts. The voracious little beasts are particularly fond of carbohydrates like grains, a staple of subsistence farmers across the continent. Back in January, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicted the worst was still to come, and that by June, the size of the swarms could grow by a factor of 500.

And now, at the worst time, a second wave of locusts 20 times bigger than the first has descended on the region, thanks to heavy rains late last month, according to the FAO. The swarms have infiltrated Yemen and firmly established themselves across the Persian Gulf, having laid eggs along 560 miles of Iran's coastline. New swarms are particularly severe in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Somalia.

"The timing is really horrendous, because the farmers are just planting, and the seedlings are just coming up now since it's the beginning of the rainy season," says Keith Cressman, senior locust forecasting officer with the FAO. "And it's right at the same time when you have an increasing number of swarms in Kenya and in Ethiopia. There's already pictures and reports of the seedlings getting hammered by the swarms. So basically that's it for the farmers' crops."