Month: January 2016

Pulling Zotac's SN970 Steam Machine from its box, first impressions are good. Despite the garish Steam logo on top, its small white case with black side panels is pleasingly understated. It's weighty, too—the "wow, this thing must be expensive!" kind of weighty that you'd hope for from a device that costs a substantial £900.

Despite being smaller than a PlayStation 4—and tiny compared to the hulking mass of an Xbox One—Zotac's Steam Machine is far more powerful thanks to the Intel Core i5 processor and Nvidia GTX 960 graphics card inside. I was really quite eager to plug it in and play some games. Then the problems started.

The last time I used Steam OS was in 2014, back when it was still in beta, and everyone was falling over themselves to declare Valve's latest invention the best thing to happen to video games since the d-pad. Since then, Steam Machines—the console-like PCs that ship with Steam OS—have been released... and the reviews haven't been kind, to put it mildly. But I figured, how bad can it be? After all, we complain about Windows all the time and its constant need for updates and new graphics card drivers that can often make things worse rather than better. An OS designed to just get out of the way and let me play games? That can only be a good thing.

(credit: NoHoDamon)

New documents released (PDF) on Wednesday by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of California show that for the last several years, police in the city of Anaheim, California—home of Disneyland—have been using an invasive cell phone surveillance device, known as a "dirtbox."

The ACLU obtained the 464 pages of documents recently after it sued the Anaheim Police Department (APD) last year over the agency’s failure to respond to its public records request concerning such surveillance-related documents.

The DRTBox has been described by one Chicago privacy activist as a "stingray on steroids," referring to the controversial cell-site simulator that spoofs cell towers to locate phones and intercept calls and texts.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson)

Update: Yesterday, February 1, marked 16 years since the 2003 Columbia disaster. Those both in the space industry and those watching have long realized and acknowledged the inherent risk in reaching the heavens ("The conquest of space is worth the risk of life,” as Gus Grissom once famously said). But events like this provide a somber reminder. In light of three recent days of NASA remembrance—January 27, January 28, and February 1—we're resurfacing our look at these tragedies and the astronauts lost. This post originally ran on January 28, 2016, and it appears unchanged below.

The middle of winter is a somber time of year for the spaceflight community. The three worst tragedies of NASA's manned space program fall within just six days on the calendar, from January 27 to February 1: Apollo 1, less than three years before Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the Moon; Challenger, watched live by millions around the world; Columbia—like Challenger before it, an avoidable accident rooted in NASA's internal culture.

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  The prime crew of Apollo 1, Virgil I "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White, II, and Roger B. Chaffee, during training in Florida. [credit: NASA ]

Apollo 1: January 27, 1967

The loss of the Apollo 1 crew (along with the spacecraft) several weeks before its intended launch date was a severe setback for America's lunar ambition. Apollo 1 was supposed to carry Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee into low Earth orbit on February 21, 1967, the first launch in a series that would culminate in a pair of American astronauts walking on the Moon's surface in July 1969. Instead, all three suffocated when fire broke out in the Command Module during what was thought to be a low-risk test.