Month: August 2016

Thanks to some serious legal gymnastics, the video game makers at Rare have been able to re-release a lot of older software they made for other companies. That includes a ton of the games made while the company was part of the Nintendo "second-party" family in the '90s. The exceptions have been held back due to legal clearance issues and copyrighted characters, and none seems more legally thorny than the legendary GoldenEye 007. Companies like Nintendo, Activision, and MGM all have legal claims to this movie-gaming mess of licensing.

Those legal issues didn't stop a team of Rare developers from remastering the 1997 N64 classic from the ground up and prepping it for launch on the Xbox 360. The existence of this unreleased remake has been proven out by leaked image and video snippets over the years, but we've never seen anything quite like Tuesday's megadump of information: a full 30 minutes of GoldenEye 007 running on debug Xbox 360 hardware.

The footage, captured and posted by gaming history site Rare Thief, contains both campaign and multiplayer gameplay. This Xbox 360 version appears to retain most of the original's aspects, including level design, mission structure, sound effects, and low-poly geometry. The "remastered" aspect comes primarily from wholly redrawn textures and added graphical flair, such as better-looking skyboxes and extra bits of geometry. The video shows an on-the-fly graphics toggle that lets players switch between N64 graphics and redrawn graphics at any time to really see the difference; this function also appeared in both recent Halo game remasters. The other obvious improvement: a silky smooth 60 frames-per-second visual refresh that far exceeds the original game's 20 FPS in campaign mode (and even lower performance in split-screen).

Enlarge / You have been served: a subpoena cover letter sent to the service provider for Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server yesterday by Rep. Lamar Smith.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, has sent subpoenas to three companies that provided services related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's private e-mail server. The subpoena seeks information on how secure the server was and whether it was protected within the guidelines set by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for systems used by government employees. Smith's subpoenas were supported by Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

The subpoenas were sent to executives of the data security firm Datto, SECNAP Network Security, and the ISP and managed services provider Platte River Networks. Datto's SIRIS disaster recovery service was used to back up the e-mail server hosting ClintonEmail.com, and SECNAP provided its Cloudjacket managed intrusion detection and prevention service to the Clinton server. Platte River Networks apparently managed the server for at least part of the period that Clinton and her staff used e-mail accounts on it while at the State Department. All three companies had previously declined to provide information to Smith's committee voluntarily.

In the letter accompanying the subpoena to Platte River Networks CEO Treve Suazo, Smith and Johnson wrote:

Enlarge (credit: Tesla)

On Tuesday, Tesla announced its new P100D version of the Model S and Model X. The cars are fast and have huge batteries—and of course, they’re very, very pricey.

The electric vehicle company headed by CEO Elon Musk called the Model S P100D the “quickest production car in the world,” noting that only two cars are faster—the LaFerrari and the Porsche 918 Spyder, both cars that were limited-run two-seaters. With the “Ludicrous Mode” option (which customers must pay extra for), the Model S P100D will go 0 to 60 miles per hour in 2.5 seconds. (That’s 0 to 100km/h in 2.7 seconds.)

When Ludicrous Mode was announced last summer, it only took a Model S P85D from 0 to 60 mph in a lackadaisical 2.8 seconds.

Enlarge (credit: NBCUniversal)

Warning: This piece contains minor spoilers for the most recent episode of Mr. Robot (S2E7)

If it wasn't already obvious, the people behind Mr. Robot keep tabs on the news. But unlike some of the ripped-from-the-headlines shows syndicated elsewhere on USA, reality serves as background tapestry—and not necessarily direct plot inspiration—for the series. As NPR TV Critic Eric Deggans told us ahead of this season, such a strategy “gives viewers the feeling everything is grounded in reality… Because they get the details right, the average viewer—and 80 percent of the viewers may not know the computer stuff—can watch it and it feels right. And when the show has to do something that’s unrealistic, this makes it that much easier to buy it.”

Last week, Mr. Robot put this idea to the ultimate test. S2's big reveal has viewers confused about what reality means within the show's universe, but that question largely applies to main character Elliot Alderson's perception and not the show at large. Within the same hour, for instance, Elliot takes a very real-world approach to torpedoing the series' stand-in for the Silk Road, Midland City. When invited to handle some sysadmin duties by the site's operator, he subtly opens Midland City up to non-Tor traffic, indexes it on some top search engines, purchases a few banner ads elsewhere, and then tips the FBI about the whole thing. Simple and truthful.

Enlarge / This small sculpture of a rabbit was found in the early 1990s at the bunny apartment complex in the Oztoyahualco neighborhood of Teotihuacan. It is likely over 1,500 years old.

In the first century BCE, right around the time when Julius Caesar was dismantling the Roman Republic, the great city of Teotihuacan dominated the region now known as Mexico. The sixth largest city in the world at the time, it was known for massive pyramids and sprawling neighborhoods. Centuries later, the Aztecs claimed the famous city as part of their own heritage. At its peak, Teotihuacan was home to more than 100,000 people. Residents were living in such close quarters that architects invented multi-story apartment buildings to house them. In one neighborhood, urban farmers kept rabbits to feed the hungry Teotihuacan masses.

A group of anthropologists describe their discovery in PLoS One, filling in details of what appears to be a rabbit farm and butcher shop in a Teotihuacan neighborhood called Oztoyahualco. From roughly the 4th through 6th centuries, this neighborhood was home to an apartment compound that immediately stood out for a few reasons. Several rooms contained an enormous number of cottontail and jackrabbit remains, as well as soil with high phosphate levels that would indicate a lot of blood or fecal matter on the ground. One room had low stone walls "suggestive of a pen for domestic animal management," the researchers write. Other rooms were full of obsidian blades and rabbit limbs, as if they were part of a butcher shop.

Add all those findings together and you've got what appears to be an apartment complex devoted to raising and slaughtering rabbits. One more piece of evidence strengthened the hypothesis: a previous excavation had uncovered an unusual rabbit sculpture (pictured above) on the site. Bunnies were obviously important to the people in this place.

Enlarge / The solar sail used to accelerate the craft provides a large target for dust grains. (credit: Breakthrough Starshot)

Breakthrough Starshot is one of the more exciting scientific ideas that has popped up in the past decade, with its promise to deliver hardware to the nearest star in time for many people currently alive to see it. While the idea would work on paper as an extrapolation of existing technology, there are a lot of details that need to be thoroughly checked out, because it's possible that one of them could present a show-stopper.

There's a bit of good news there: Breakthrough Starshot is apparently funding the needed research to give its concept a thorough vetting. A recent posting to the arXiv describes a careful look at the odds of a spacecraft surviving an extended journey at the speeds planned for the trip. Overall, things look good, but a bit of shielding will be needed, and there's the potential for a catastrophic collision with a speck of dust.

The work, done by a team of four astronomers, focuses on one of the most basic issues: spacecraft survival. The goal of Breakthrough Starshot is to accelerate its craft to about 20 percent the speed of light. At that speed, even individual atoms can damage the vehicle, and a collision with a bit of dust could be catastrophic. So the team set out to quantify just how risky these collisions could be.

Enlarge / Jeff Williams works aboard the Space Station in April. (credit: NASA)

During his nearly year-long mission aboard the International Space Station, former NASA astronaut Scott Kelly garnered a large measure of attention for his Ironman feats, including setting a US record for the cumulative amount of time in space—520 days. Jeff Williams may be less well-known, but he will quietly become NASA’s new spaceflight Ironman on Wednesday morning.

Williams has reached 520 days after a Space Shuttle mission in 2000, two previous increments on the Space Station in 2006 and 2009, and he’s now nearing the end of his third mission to the Space Station. When he lands on September 6, Williams will have spent a cumulative 534 days in space, two weeks longer than Kelly’s total. (No NASA astronaut can equal the duration records of Russian cosmonauts. The all-time leader, Gennady Padalka, has spent 879 days in space over five missions).

In many ways, Williams' tenure at NASA has paralleled the development of the Space Station. After a decorated career as a test pilot, Williams was selected to become an astronaut in 1996, a time when the United States and Russia were in the formative stages of planning and developing the station as an international project. His first spaceflight, in May 2000, was just the third shuttle flight devoted to station construction. It helped pave the way for the first crews to live aboard the station, beginning in November, 2000. Williams is also the first NASA astronaut to spend three separate increments aboard the orbiting laboratory.