On 3rd Try, South Korea Launches Satellite Into Orbit

Yonhap/Reuters

The Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1 was launched from the Naro Space Center in Goheung, South Korea, on Wednesday.

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea succeeded in thrusting a satellite into orbit for the first time on Wednesday, joining an elite club of space technology leaders seven weeks after the successful launching of a satellite by its rival, North Korea.

South Korea has attached an intense national pride to the 140-ton, 108-foot-tall Korea Space Launch Vehicle-1, or KSLV-1, which was built with the help of Russian technology. Feeling behind China and Japan, both of which have successful space programs, South Korea has sought a technological prowess of its own.

That task gained more urgency after North Korea launched a long-range rocket on Dec. 12 that put a satellite into orbit, after earlier failures. Only a handful of countries have succeeded in independently launching satellites into orbit, with Iran also recently joining the club. After studying the debris of the North Korean rocket, which splashed into South Korean waters, officials here determined that North Korea, despite its backward economy, had built key parts of its rocket.

With all major South Korean television stations broadcasting live, the two-stage rocket blasted off from the newly built Naro Space Center in Goheung, 200 miles south of Seoul.

“After analyzing the data, we determined that our satellite entered its intended orbit,” Lee Ju-ho, the minister of education, science and technology, said during a nationally televised news conference. “Today, we took a leap toward becoming a power in space technology.”

Although part of the two-stage rocket was built by the Russians, South Korea sees the successful launching as having given it an important toehold in space technology, the latest high-tech market where the country has decided to become a player.

The successful launching comes at a delicate time on the Korean Peninsula, as North Korea, stung by new international sanctions over its own rocket launching, has promised a nuclear test. The United Nations has banned North Korea, which has an active nuclear arms program, from ballistic missile tests; the West considers the launching a test of that technology.

South Korea previously fired a KSLV-1 rocket twice from Goheung, first in 2009 and again in 2010, but each time, the rocket failed to put a satellite into orbit. This was the third effort, initially scheduled for October, but it had been twice delayed at the last minute because of technical glitches.

For years, South Korea’s space ambitions have languished under the constraints of agreements with the United States, which feared that a robust rocket program might be transferred to the building of missiles and help accelerate a regional arms race.

U.S. Proposes to Protect Wolverines

The federal Fish and Wildlife Service proposed Friday to give Endangered Species Act protections to the wolverine, one of the largest and hardiest members of the weasel family, largely because climate change is whittling away its wintry habitat in the northern Rockies.

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Steve Kroschel)/USFWS, via Associated Press

Climate change is whittling away the wolverine’s habitat.

The action was prompted by a lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, based in Arizona, and Defenders of Wildlife, whose efforts to get federal protections for the species were rebuffed during the administration of President George W. Bush.

About 300 of the elusive animals live and forage in the high mountains of the Northwest.

If made final, the proposal to list the animal as threatened would put wolverines, like polar bears, elkhorn coral and staghorn coral, into a small but growing group of species whose survival is threatened by global warming, rather than traditional threats like predators or logging.

“Extensive climate modeling indicates that the wolverine’s snowpack habitat will be greatly reduced and fragmented in the coming years due to climate warming, thereby threatening the species with extinction,” the proposed rule said.

The fierce predators, whose wide feet and sharp claws keep them agile during mountain winters, weigh 25 to 45 pounds when fully grown but will fight a bear that strays into their territory. They raise newborn kits in burrows deep beneath snows that do not melt until mid-May.

After being trapped to near-extinction as part of the 19th-century fur trade, wolverines were so rare that they fell out of the public consciousness or were confused with wolves, an entirely different species. Even the actor Hugh Jackman, who plays the Marvel Comics character Wolverine in the “X-Men” movies, recently said he had prepared for the role by studying wolves.

But for scientists and naturalists who monitor the species, wolverines are a source of fascination with intricate biological mechanisms, including a thyroid that supercharges their metabolism and an extra coat for insulation. Their jaws are strong enough to crack the frozen bones of their prey. The new proposal, as written, would not restrict logging or winter recreation — like snowmobiling — in the wolverine’s habitat, but it would end the intentional trapping of the animals.

Timothy Preso, a lawyer handling the lawsuit, praised the proposal, saying it offered “a welcome promise of new efforts to protect the mountains where wolverines are found and the intervening lands they’ll need.”

F.T.C. Suggests Guidelines on Privacy for Mobile Apps

WASHINGTON — In a strong move to protect the privacy of Americans as they use the Internet on their smartphones and tablets, the Federal Trade Commission on Friday said the mobile industry should include a do-not-track feature in software and apps and take other steps to safeguard personal information.

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Ken James for The New York Times

Path, a mobile social network, lets users keep online journals that can be shared with a limited group of family and friends.

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Jose Luis Magana/Associated Press

Jon Leibowitz, the F.T.C. chairman, said the mobile industry should let users opt out of having their online activities tracked.

The staff report, which was approved by the commission, is not binding, but it is an indication of how seriously the agency is focused on mobile privacy. As if to emphasize that, the commission on Friday separately fined Path, a two-year-old social networking app, $800,000. It charged the company with violating federal privacy protections for children by collecting personal information on underage users, including almost everyone in users’ address books.

Together the actions represent the government’s heightened scrutiny of mobile devices, which for many Americans have become the primary way of gaining access to the Internet, rather than through a laptop or desktop computer.

“We‘ve been looking at privacy issues for decades,” said Jon Leibowitz, the F.T.C. chairman. “But this is necessary because so much commerce is moving to mobile, and many of the rules and practices in the mobile space are sort of like the Wild West.”

The report lays out a clear picture of what sort of activities might bring a company under investigation — like, for example, conveying the impression that an app will gather geolocation data only one time, when, in fact, it does so repeatedly.

For companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and BlackBerry (formerly Research in Motion), the suggestions essentially carry the weight of policy.

But the F.T.C. also has its sights on thousands of small businesses that create apps that smartphone users can download for a specific service. The introduction of the iPhone created a sort of gold rush among start-ups to create apps featuring games, music, maps and consumer services like shopping and social networking.

“This says if you’re outside the recommended behavior, you’re at a higher risk of enforcement action,” said Mary Ellen Callahan, a partner at Jenner & Block and former chief privacy officer for the Department of Homeland Security.

Morgan Reed, executive director of the Association for Competitive Technology, a trade group representing app developers, said that the organization generally supported the commission’s report but that it had some concerns about what he called “unintended consequences.”

If app stores are worried about their own liability over whether they have adequately checked the privacy protections of a mobile app they sell, they might err on the side of caution and not screen for privacy at all, he said.

The federal recommendations follow a similar set of guidelines issued last month by the California attorney general, whose tips effectively set the standard for technology companies nationwide, given the state’s huge consumer market.

The trade commission and the Obama administration last year issued separate sets of recommendations for safeguarding consumers’ online privacy, and the subject has attracted growing concern in Congress.

But most of the focus to date, particularly with do-not-track policies, has been on Internet browsers commonly used at home but not on cellphones. Do-not-track features let users request that their footsteps not be followed as they move around online.

The commission and the administration have begun to focus on mobile data privacy partly because smartphones let so many entities gain access to personal information, including wireless service providers, mobile operating system developers, handset manufacturers, app companies, analytics outfits and advertisers — “a degree unprecedented in the desktop environment,” the report said.

The activities of Path, a company in San Francisco, illustrate some of the F.T.C.’s concerns. The company developed a social networking app that allows people to keep an online journal about moments in their lives, including written entries, photos, music to which they are listening and their location. A user can share a journal with up to 150 people. The app has been installed more than 2.5 million times.

The F.T.C. asserted that Path, without alerting its users, had engaged in deceptive practices because it routinely collected and stored information about the contacts in users’ address books. The privacy policy that Path provided to consumers said it collected limited, mainly technical information about users’ devices.

In fact, the commission said, Path was collecting personal details including addresses, phone numbers, usernames for Facebook and Twitter, as well as dates of birth.

The company also collected some of that information from users who, in signing up for the service, indicated that they were under age 13 without permission of their parents or disclosure of how it would use the information — violations of rules adopted under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

Path, without admitting or denying the accusations, agreed to pay an $800,000 fine and to comply with the children’s privacy act, destroy already collected children’s information, follow its own stated privacy policy and have its privacy efforts monitored by an outside party.

In a statement posted on its Web site, Path said that “there was a period of time where our system was not automatically rejecting people who indicated that they were under 13.” But even before the F.T.C. contacted the company, Path said, “we discovered and fixed this sign-up process qualification and took further action by suspending any underage accounts that had mistakenly been allowed to be created.”

The F.T.C. staff report, which was approved by a 4-to-0 vote, with one commission member not participating, recognized that steps were already being taken to adopt best practices for privacy protection. Among them is the creation of a group, Moms With Apps, which developed a badge icon to alert parents to the advertising and data-collection practices of apps aimed at children.

Even before this report, “the F.T.C. has not been meek,” said Lisa J. Sotto, managing partner of Hunton & Williams in New York. “They have brought a number of enforcement actions,” she said. “Those in the mobile ecosystem know they’re in the regulators’ sights.”