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Enlarge / NASA is unhappy with its HPE services contract. (credit: NASA)

As part of a plan to help NASA "modernize" its desktop and laptop computers, the space agency signed a $2.5 billion (~£1.9 billion) services contract with HP Enterprise Services in 2011. According to HP (now HPE), part of the Agency Consolidated End-User Service (ACES) program the computing company would "modernize NASA’s entire end-user infrastructure by delivering a full range of personal computing services and devices to more than 60,000 users." HPE also said the program would "allow (NASA) employees to more easily collaborate in a secure computing environment."

The services contract, alas, hasn't gone quite as well as one might have hoped. This week Federal News Radio reported that HPE is doing such a poor job that NASA's chief information officer, Renee Wynn, could no longer accept the security risks associated with the contract. Wynn, therefore, did not sign off on the authority to operate (ATO) for systems and tools.

A NASA spokeswoman confirmed the ATO expired on July 24. She said Wynn signed a “conditional” ATO for the systems under ACES, but internal NASA sources said the authorization is just for the management tools and not for the desktops, laptops and other end user devices.

“NASA continues to work with HPE to remediate vulnerabilities,” the spokeswoman said. “As required by NASA policy, system owners must accomplish this remediation within a specified period of time. For those vulnerabilities that cannot be fully remediated within the established time frame, a Plan of Actions and Milestones (POAM) must be developed, approved, and tracked to closure.”

Letting an ATO expire on a major agency network is unheard of in government.

Practically, this probably won't change much on the ground for NASA's computing systems immediately. But operating without an ATO indicates that the agency is accepting (or perhaps "accepting") a large amount of operational IT security risks, instead of trying to understand and mitigate them.

(credit: Google)

Pop-up ads are annoying on desktop, but even more frustrating on mobile devices when they sometimes take over the browser. Google wants to fix that: in a blog post, the company announced that, starting next year, websites with intrusive advertisements will be punished and may be pushed down in search results.

Essentially, Google wants search results to favor sites that have the best information and the least annoying advertisements that cover up that information. "While the underlying content is present on the page and available to be indexed by Google," the blog post says, "content may be visually obscured by an interstitial. This can frustrate users because they are unable to easily access the content that they were expecting when they tapped on the search result."

Google claims these intrusive ads and interstitials create "a poorer experience" for users, particularly on mobile where space is limited by smaller screens. It's not wrong—sometimes pop-up or pop-over ads that show up on mobile websites can take up the entire display, forcing you to view them while furiously trying to find the "X" to close them. After January 10, 2017, sites that show these kinds of ads (which include content-obscuring "please subscribe to our newsletter!" pop-overs) "may not rank as highly" in search results.

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COLOGNE, Germany—What is Scalebound? A slick, action-packed Platinum Games (makers of the Bayonetta and Devil May Cry games) combo-fest? A fantasy RPG with dungeons and dragons and magic spells? An epic story-based adventure? Two years after its announcement—and three since development began—I'm still not sure. Heck, I don't think even Microsoft knows.

Scalebound's Gamescom outing is the latest in a long line of short video clips, technical teases, and scripted battles that have been released since E3 2014, where the game was first revealed in spectacular fashion at Microsoft's press conference. Its debut trailer—which introduced a cocky 20-something headphone-wearing hipster named Drew and his hulking great dragon Thuban—drew criticism for the apparent douchbaggery of its lead, but there was no denying the overall appeal. A new Platinum Games title with dragons that fight and breathe fire and four-player co-op? Shut up and take all of my money.

What we know about Scalebound so far is that Drew and Thuban fight alongside each other, rather than with each other, and that it's an open-world game set in "Draconis" with RPG-like elements and real-time combat. The biggest reveal came during Gamescom 2015, when Microsoft dropped a lengthy gameplay trailer showing Drew riding Thuban—complete with light human-to-dragon banter—into battle against a group of heavily armoured soldiers. Cue some sword swinging, crossbow firing, and plenty of random numbers popping up all over the screen. Oh, and a fight against a giant mantis culminating in a fierce fire-breathing attack from Thuban.