Month: August 2016

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump leaves after speaking during his campaign event on August 3, 2016 in Daytona, Florida. (credit: Getty Images)

During a brief, unofficial Reddit AMA one week ago, the Republican nominee for president of the United States, Donald Trump, had kind words for NASA and US space policy. “Honestly I think NASA is wonderful! America has always led the world in space exploration,” Trump responded to a question on NASA's role in his administration.

Evidently Trump no longer feels that way. During a "town hall" Wednesday in Daytona Beach, Florida, about 75 miles up the coast from Kennedy Space Center, the presidential candidate offered some extemporaneous remarks (see video) about America's progress in space. "By the way, look at your space program, look at what's going on there," he said. "Somebody just asked me backstage, 'Mr. Trump, will you get involved in the space program?' Look what's happened with your employment. Look what's happened with our whole history of space and leadership. Look what's going on folks. We're like a third world nation."

Somehow during the last week, when NASA demonstrated progress with its SLS rocket, a US company received a license to make the first-ever private launch to the Moon, SpaceX successfully tested a rocket that landed on a boat, and NASA's Juno spacecraft reached the halfway point of its first orbit around Jupiter, America's space enterprise has gone from always leading the world to being worthy of a developing country.

This is the SFW version of the spin-off's card selection.

Board game smash hit Codenames has earned countless accolades and awards since its 2015 launch due to its ease of play, surprising depth, and family friendliness. The game revolves around giant packs of words, which means a simple "add some more words" offshoot or expansion was inevitable, but the game's first official follow-up wastes no time erasing the phrase "family friendly" from the recommendation list.

Codenames: Deep Undercover began appearing at Target shops in late July, and this week it finally officially launched at more Targets (and will, for now, remain an exclusive at the US big-box chain) for $20. The 200-card set only differs from the core game in one key aspect: dirty words. Players split into two teams, and they're each led by a "spymaster" who must help his or her teammates figure out which face-up words on a table belong to their team—and must do so with one-word clues, which makes the clue-giving process pretty tricky.

But while the original game's word list mostly consisted of neutral words and proper nouns, C:DU takes the blue route, consisting mostly of sexual words (squirt, vibrator), slurs (bitch, slut), and double entendres (clam, pickle). The game also comes with Codenames' first official set of blank cards, on which players can write their own vulgar or gross words of choice, along with more stylized versions of its "bystander" cards.

Master Chief awaits you on the Xbox One S' disc drive mount. (credit: iFixit)

Ars' review of the latest Xbox hardware revision, the Xbox One S, took a long look at the console's updated exterior (along with its 4K- and HDR-related upgrades). To get to know its guts, however, we turn to the teardown experts at iFixit, who went on a warranty-voiding dive on Wednesday to find out how Microsoft shrank the system a full 42 percent.

In doing so, the site's teardown team confirmed the myriad parts making up the full system, and as expected, we're getting the kind of change in parts vendors and component sizes we expected from a three-years-later hardware revision. For starters, iFixit shows off the Xbox One S' updated, shrunken power supply, which is now fanless, embedded in the system, and wedged nicely alongside the updated cooling rig—a custom-molded 120mm fan, an aluminum heat sink, and a copper heat pipe set.

The launch edition's 2TB hard drive can also be seen, and in good news, its interface has been upgraded from SATA II to SATA III. Our testing didn't reveal any particular drive-speed boosts as a result of this, which is probably because the included Seagate drive runs at 5400 RPM (with a 32MB cache), but we'll be curious to see whether the system's loading times are boosted when a solid state drive is hooked into that SATA III interface; if the Xbox One S' SATA controller is rated for SATA III, the difference could be noticeable. Anybody who tests this, however, risks voiding Xbox's hardware warranty.

Getty Images has been accused of selling unauthorized licenses to this, and thousands of other photos. (credit: Richard Liebowitz)

Getty Images has been hit with a second copyright-related lawsuit less than a week after famed photographer Carol Highsmith sued the company.

On Monday, Zuma Press, an independent press agency, sued Getty for alleged copyright violations and unauthorized licensing of more than 47,000 images.

In its nine-page civil complaint, Zuma attorney Richard Liebowitz alleged that as Getty has been rapidly expanding its collection of images, it has run roughshod over copyright.

(credit: Illustration by Sean MacEntee)

As the Federal Communications Commission debates new privacy rules for Internet service providers, Comcast has urged the commission to let ISPs offer different prices based on whether customers opt into systems that share their data and deliver personalized ads.

Comcast executives met with FCC officials last week, and "urged that the Commission allow business models offering discounts or other value to consumers in exchange for allowing ISPs to use their data," Comcast wrote in an ex parte filing that describes the meeting. (MediaPost covered the filing yesterday.)

AT&T is the biggest Internet provider offering such a plan. AT&T's "Internet Preferences" program reroutes customers' Web browsing to an in-house traffic scanning platform, analyzes the customers' search and browsing history, and then uses the results to deliver personalized ads to websites. With Internet Preferences enabled, AT&T customers can pay as little as $70 per month for 1Gbps fiber-to-the-home service, but those who don't opt into Internet Preferences must pay at least $29 a month extra.

Amazon’s Fire Phone was, by any reasonable metric, a colossal failure. Amazon took a $170 million write down on unsold inventory and contracts with its suppliers, and the phone’s $649 starting price tumbled below $200 in just four months. The Fire Phone's reputation was mostly deserved—Amazon’s fork of Android cut it off from the Google Play ecosystem, and its hardware was built around a couple of gimmicks that didn’t actually address actual needs. Talk of a follow-up phone persisted for a while, but no phone ever surfaced. Until now.

Kind of.

Amazon is getting back into smartphones, but instead of dumping money into R&D and maintaining its own forked OS and ecosystem, the company is taking a page from its e-readers by slapping ads and preinstalled apps onto existing budget-friendly phones. In exchange, buyers get a $50 discount on a handful of already-inexpensive phones, assuming they’re already paying $99/year for an Amazon Prime subscription (one could conceivably skirt this requirement by signing up for a Prime trial and then canceling).