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Looking GOOD, probot. Philae good, humans: 'Yes ... YES! The lander is sitting on the ground'

Plus: 'Toll roads will KILL the net', booms Obama

QuoTW This was the week when a bunch of European space boffins made history by successfully landing a man-made object on a speeding, icy comet, after a few dramatic, bouncy bumps along the way.

The Register's space vulture Brid-Aine Parnell witnessed the tense affair unfold at the European Space Agency's ops complex in Darmstadt, Germany, as the plucky Philae probot set off on its perilous journey to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Upon touchdown, Rosetta flight director Andrea Accamazzo exclaimed:

Yes, yes, YES! We see the lander sitting on the ground!

Scientists at ESA, some of whom have been working on the project for 25 years, found it impossible to hold back their emotions when they established contact with the leggy, fridge-sized 'craft, after it had settled on the cosmic-rock.

67P is currently hurtling through space over 500 million kilometres (around 300 million miles) from Earth, and it has taken ESA 10 years to catch up with the comet.

Philae lander manager Dr Stephan Ulemac enthused:

Philae is talking to us, the first thing he told us is that the harpoons fired and the landing gear has been retracted. He’s there and Philae is talking to us!

Incredibly, the probot managed to settle on the comet even though its harpoons failed to work. It had been hoped that they would fire into 67P, thereby stabilising Philae, instead, the 'craft's ice-screw legs may have anchored it to the space-rock.

Communications from Philae were sketchy in the immediate hours after it landed on the comet. It's the lander's job to scoop up data and then transmit it in packages to the Rosetta mothersatellite, which in turn feeds back as much information as possible to Earth.

Nerves were understandably jangled at ESA, but the agency's head of mission operations Paolo Ferri was relieved to be able to tell the world:

It’s a vital link, but the fact that it’s being interrupted is a secondary concern. What’s important is that the link is there.

Things then turned decidedly shady for Philae, which – with only 64 hours of battery life – was relying on our Sun to help power up the solar panel-wielding probot.

Koen Guerts from the Lander Control Centre at DLR in Cologne explained why a long shadow had been cast on Philae's mission:

We see that we’re getting less sunlight than we planned for at the landing site, we’re getting around 1.5 hours of Sun instead of the six or seven that we were aiming for. We are calculating now what this means for the near future. Unfortunately, this was not the situation we were hoping for.

All eyes may have been on Darmstadt this week as the beaming boffins kept their eyes focused on Philae, but back on Earth there were dramas of a very different kind.

Over at Google, the ad giant's chief legal officer David Drummond moaned:

Right now, European citizens do not have the right to challenge misuse of their data by the US government in US courts – even though American citizens already enjoy this right in most European countries. It’s why Google supports legislation to extend the US Privacy Act to EU citizens.

That's right: the Chocolate Factory thinks it has the perfect answer to protecting the European Union's 500 million bods from State-side spooks. But wait, did Google just put the "G" in g-men? Lordy.

Drummond's comments came around the same time as the European Commission's new competition chief Margrethe Vestager had this to say about the ad giant's online dominance:

The sheer amount of data controlled by Google gives rise to a series of societal challenges. Privacy is one of the most pressing concerns.

But such lofty opinions didn't end with Google's top lawyer this week. President Obama, sore from Democrat election defeat in Congress, couldn't resist wading into the net neutrality bun fight in a broadside against US telcos.

He thundered that "abandoning the principles" behind the internet's "neutrality" would mean the "end of the internet". He said:

There should be no toll roads on the information highway.

Obama added: "I am urging the Federal Communications Commission to do everything they can to protect the internet for everyone. I am asking the FCC to reclassify internet service under Title II of a law known as the Telecommunication Act."

In Blighty, health data-slurper-in-chief Tim Kelsey warned NHS organisations that they were at risk of having their funding pulled if they failed to reach, er, "digital maturity" within the next four to six years.

Kelsey told El Reg:

We have to draw a line in the sand and say you have to go digital by 2018-2020 or you wont get paid.

Which is nice.

There was strife over at Virgin Media last weekend when the cable company's customers were cut loose from all sorts of websites, following a major censorship snafu.

VM's over-sensitive, smut-filtering Web Safe tech suffered a serious glitch. And yet, the ISP insisted that it had merely been a "hiccup". Vulture Weekend got the impression, to stretch the analogy further, that this was more of a long, rude burp that hung in the air for hours.

And finally, the administrator behind the recently seized Doxbin posted logs that appeared to hint at how the FBI had been able to take control of the site.

The poster, carrying the handle Nachash, uploaded the files to the tor-dev website late last Saturday. He promised not to attempt to bring Doxbin, which had been used by wrongdoers to publish people's personal information for nefarious means, back to life. Nachash wrote:

It isn't every day that someone like me pops up on tor-dev, and I just want to make sure this is as productive and helpful as possible. This will probably be a very humbling experience, because unlike my fellow illegal onion operators both past and present, I will actually be outside of a jail cell and able to read the ruthless dissection of my set-up.

He opened his post with the attention-seeking subject line:

Yes hello, internet supervillain here.

That moniker must work as a great ice-breaker at dinner parties, right? ®

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