Month: February 2016

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden delivers his "State of NASA" speech at Langley Research Center on Tuesday. (credit: NASA)

Each year President Obama submits a budget for NASA to Congress, and each year the House of Representatives and Senate essentially toss out those numbers and come up with their own figures. Now that the President has submitted a $19 billion NASA budget for fiscal year 2017, we can expect the same scenario to play out again this year.

The macro battle with Congress will likely remain over the direction of the space agency. NASA sees itself as being on a journey to Mars. On Tuesday Charlie Bolden, the agency’s administrator and a four-time astronaut, reiterated that point. “We are closer today than ever before in human history to sending humans to the red planet,” Bolden said during a State of NASA speech. “Our plan is clear, affordable, sustainable and attainable.”

However Congress has become increasingly skeptical about the viability of NASA’s plan to go to Mars. During a hearing earlier this month, Republicans openly questioned whether NASA was, in fact, on a path to Mars. The chairman of the House Science Committee, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), called it an "imbalanced proposal [that] continues to tie our astronauts’ feet to the ground and makes a Mars mission all but impossible,” in a statement to Ars.

All of the pretty MS-DOS virus colors. (credit: Archive.org)

Archive.org has gone to great lengths to preserve and host dated software, but up until last week, its vast collection of classic games and MS-DOS executables skewed toward the overly safe side. Sure, you could run the original Oregon Trail—even on your web browser, through a DOSBOX emulator—and burden virtual pioneers with dysentery, but what about acquiring an actual virus?

That changed on Friday with the site's unveiling of the Malware Museum, a website collection of 78 viruses from the MS-DOS era of the late '80s and early '90s, all ready to either launch on a DOSBOX web browser emulator or be downloaded to your hard drive. Before you fret about some kind of crazy dated-virus outbreak, know that Archive.org went to the trouble of "defanging" every virus in its collection.

The "museum" began to take shape when longtime Finnish computer security expert Mikko Hypponen offered his personal collection of roughly 30 viruses, which he'd already disassembled to remove their drive-destructive capabilities, to Archive.org software curator Jason Scott. "He contacted me a week ago, out of the blue, asking if I wanted to do anything with this collection [of viruses]," Scott said in a phone interview with Ars. "I just put them all up and said, 'Yes, I like it, and I already put them all up [on the site]!'"

(credit: Robert S. Donovan)

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday blocked (PDF) the Obama administration's climate change initiative in response to a petition by more than two dozen states and other energy companies suing the Environmental Protection Agency over the carbon-emissions cutting regulations.

The high court's move comes two weeks after a federal appeals court said that the plan, which impacts hundreds of power plants across the nation and is one of the president's centerpiece accomplishments, could proceed even as a legal challenge is pending. That appeals court, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, will hear oral arguments June 2 on the carbon plan Obama announced in October.

The justices sided with the states on a 5-4 vote and said the regulations are shelved until the legal wrangling is concluded—which could take years.

(credit: Transport for London Centerline Removal Trial)

Throughout the past year, a number of newly paved roads in and around London were finished without the traditional center lines dividing traffic. According to a white paper published (PDF) by Transport for London (TfL), removal of center lines on roads where the speed limit is less than 30 miles per hour results in a "statistically significant reduction in vehicle speeds.”

Trials in Norfolk and Wiltshire have also supported the removal of the center line to reduce vehicle speed.

The TfL white paper found that drivers tend to slow their driving by up to 4mph on roads with no center lines. But, since the study was only conducted on smooth, newly-paved roads, the researchers at TfL corrected the data to account for the fact that drivers tend to go slightly faster when they feel confident that the road is in good condition. With such corrections, TfL found that the lack of center lines could theoretically reduce average vehicle speeds by up to 8.6mph.

Today, the Obama administration released the president's Cybersecurity National Action Plan (CNAP), a set of executive actions and budget requests that seeks to fix federal agencies' information security woes. The plan aims to spur broader efforts to protect citizens' privacy and the security of the nation's businesses and infrastructure from criminals and other threats. And it starts off by creating a commission to figure out how to do that.

The Federal government's information security posture, as demonstrated by the Office of Personnel Management breach last year, is at best antiquated and at worst horrific in its inadequacy. The CNAP looks to rapidly infuse money into efforts to modernize the decrepit information security systems at agencies such as the Social Security Administration, which as President Obama wrote in an op-ed piece published today by the Wall Street Journal, "uses systems and code from the 1960s. No successful business could operate this way.”

To make the fixes, the Obama administration is asking for over $19 billion in spending scattered across the proposed 2017 budget and is making a number of immediate moves that require funding now—$3.1 billion for an Information Technology Modernization Fund and to pay a new Federal Chief Information Security Officer (with a salary of between $123,175 and $185,100 a year, Top Secret/SCI clearance required—apply by February 26 if interested).

Now that we have an "Internet of Things" and devices that make ethical decisions, the next step was bound to be weird. Designer Simone Rebaudengo has created a smart fan with a built-in ethical dilemma: it can only fan one person at a time. To decide who will benefit from its cooling powers, the fan outsources its problem to Mechanical Turk, and the crowd decides which person in the machine's range deserves fanning.

Simone Rebaudengo's smart fan picks a human to focus on based on ethical decision dials and crowdsourcing. (credit: Simone Rebaudengo)

Rebaudengo's invention is an art project called "Ethical Things." Its inspiration came from battlefield robots and autonomous cars, both of which are loaded up with algorithms that help the machines make life-or-death decisions all the time. But what about the more mundane ethical decisions we have to make every day? That's where the fan comes in. "If a 'smart' coffee machine knows about its user's heart problems, should it accept giving him a coffee when he requests one?" asks Rebaudengo. His fan is a humorous way of imagining a future of ordinary connected devices that nevertheless face these kinds of moral dilemmas because they have so much access to data about the humans who own them.

Rebaudengo writes: