President Donald Trump last week signed a bill authorizing the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to acquire weather data from commercial satellite systems, Space News reported Friday.

Jeff Foust writes the Weather Research and Forecasting Innovation Act of 2017 allows NOAA to spend up to $6 million a year to conduct a pilot procurement program that will study the effectiveness of commercial data to aid weather forecasts from fiscal 2017 to fiscal 2020.

The law also requires NOAA to complete and begin operations of the Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere and Climate 2 or COSMIC-2 mission, which will place 12 satellites into equatorial and polar orbits, Foust reported.

Six COSMIC-2 satellites will be launched on a SpaceX-built Falcon Heavy rocket later this year while a second batch of six satellites will be deployed to polar orbit in 2019, according to the report.

Foust added the law directs NOAA to forge an agreement with the National Academies by the end of FY 2018 to research future weather satellite systems.

Ajit Pai, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, has said he met with executives at tech companies such as Intel, Oracle, Cisco and Facebook to seek comments on his plan to overturn certain aspects of “net neutrality” rules, The New York Times reported Thursday.

Cecilia Kang writes Pai said Thursday in a news conference that he thinks tech companies aim to find a “common ground” when it comes to net neutrality rules, which require internet service providers to guarantee clients equal access to all online content.

He said he believes the net neutrality rules that FCC created in 2015 pose restrictions on broadband service providers and that he plans to reverse the classification of broadband internet as a utility.

The report noted that Pai, who assumed his post in January, approved Thursday two measures that seek to relax pricing restrictions on telecommunications companies and provide broadcast television firms leeway to grow through mergers.

The meeting with tech companies over net neutrality rules came weeks after Pai urged internet service providers to maintain an open internet through voluntary agreements.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has unveiled a radio signal traffic emulator built to simulate electromagnetic communications during DARPA’s collaborative machine-learning competition.

The Colosseum will serve as a testbed for electromagnetic systems in civilian and military domains as part of the three-year, $3.75 million Spectrum Collaboration Challenge, DARPA said Friday.

A team of engineers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory assembled the Colosseum using 128 National Instruments-built software-based radios and 64 field programmable gate arrays.

The system is housed inside a server room at the APL campus in Laurel, Maryland.

“The Colosseum is the wireless research environment that we hope will catalyze the advent of autonomous, intelligent, and—most importantly, collaborative—radio technology, which will be essential as the population of devices linking wirelessly to each other and to the internet continues to grow exponentially,” said Paul Tilghman, DARPA’s SC2 program manager.

“We are asking SC2 competitors to devise fundamentally new radio systems that can learn from each other in real-time, making the need for arduous radio specifications obsolete,” Tilghman added.

DARPA said Colosseum works to emulate tens of thousands of potential interactions among hundreds of wireless communication devices such as cell phones, internet-of-things devices and military radios.

Mary McCord, acting assistant attorney general and principal deputy assistant attorney general for national security at the Justice Department, will step down from her position in May, NPR reported Thursday.

Carrie Johnson writes McCord told her staff in a written message that she will leave the department “to pursue new career opportunities.”

The report said McCord leads DOJ’s investigation into allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and has held various leadership roles in the department’s national security unit over the past three years.

She previously served as criminal division chief at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, where she oversaw the prosecution of criminal matters in federal district court.

McCord also supervised cases in the U.S. and District of Columbia Courts of Appeals as deputy chief in the Appellate Division.

The Justice Department‘s Office of Information Policy has partnered with the General Services Administration‘s 18F digital services group to build a website for processing of Freedom of Information Act requests.

OIP said Wednesday it will gather input from agency personnel and requesters on the creation of a national FOIA portal, as mandated by the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016.

Interested parties can submit ideas to the OIP by April 28.

Melanie Pustay, director the OIP, told FCW in an interview published Thursday that the organization has secured a $1.3 million budget to establish the site for people to request governmental records from 119 agencies covered by FOIA.

Pustay added her office will establish the portal in an effort to guide visitors toward correct agencies as well as locate and access information they need.

OIP aims to launch an operational version of the FOIA site within the 2017 calendar year.