Month: August 2016

(credit: NASA)

In 2009, following a series of space shuttle missions to complete major portions of the International Space Station, the crew size aboard the orbiting laboratory expanded to six. The number of crew members aboard the station has, more or less, remained steady since then, with Russia providing half the crew while NASA and its international partners provide another three astronauts.

But, in a surprise announcement, Russia is considering scaling back its crew complement from three to two. According to Russian media reports, Sergei Krikalev, the director of human programs for Roscosmos, said the move was made to lower Russia's ongoing costs to service the station. By reducing the number of its crew members, Russia will need to fly fewer Progress cargo ships, which deliver food and supplies to the Russian side of the station.

Roscosmos already spends considerably less on station operations than NASA does. Russian media report that Roscosmos plans to spend about $4.1 billion from 2016 through 2025 for station maintenance. That's just a little more than NASA's annual expenses for station operation and transportation, which were $3.7 billion in fiscal year 2016.

(credit: Shadow Brokers)

In what security experts say is either a one-of-a-kind breach or an elaborate hoax, an anonymous group has published what it claims are sophisticated software tools belonging to an elite team of hackers tied to the US National Security Agency.

In a recently published blog post, the group calling itself Shadow Brokers claims the leaked set of exploits were obtained after members hacked Equation Group (the post has since been removed from Tumblr). Last year, Kaspersky Lab researchers described Equation Group as one of the world's most advanced hacking groups, with ties to both the Stuxnet and Flame espionage malware platforms. The compressed data accompanying the Shadow Broker post is slightly bigger than 256 megabytes and purports to contain a series of hacking tools dating back to 2010. While it wasn't immediately possible for outsiders to prove the posted data—mostly batch scripts and poorly coded python scripts—belonged to Equation Group, there was little doubt the data have origins with some advanced hacking group.

Not fully fake

"These files are not fully fake for sure," Bencsáth Boldizsár, a researcher with Hungary-based CrySyS who is widely credited with discovering Flame, told Ars in an e-mail. "Most likely they are part of the NSA toolset, judging just by the volume and peeps into the samples. At first glance it is sound that these are important attack related files, and yes, the first guess would be Equation Group."

(credit: Erik B)

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal wrote that investigators from the US Department of Justice have evidence to support criminal charges against Volkswagen Group for installing illegal software on 600,000 diesel vehicles sold in the US between 2009 and 2015. The illegal software circumvented emissions regulations.

Those same sources for the WSJ say that prosecutors are torn between seeking a guilty plea from the company or negotiating a deferred prosecution agreement. The deferred prosecution agreement would dismiss charges against VW as long as the automaker signs an agreement to stick to certain settlement terms.

Reuters confirmed the situation with two sources. Reuters reported earlier this summer that a consent decree between the US and VW Group could involve “an independent monitor overseeing the German automaker's conduct and significant yet-to-be determined fines for emissions violations.”

(credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft is switching Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 to a cumulative update model similar to the one used by Windows 10. The company is moving away from the individual hotfix approach it has used thus far for those operating systems.

One of the major differences between Windows 7 and 8.1 on the one hand and Windows 10 on the other is what happens when you run Windows Update. Microsoft's two older operating systems usually need to fetch a handful of individual patches each month. If a system hasn't been patched for a few months, this can require dozens of individual fixes to be retrieved. In the case of a clean installation, that number can reach the hundreds.

Windows 10, on the other hand, has perhaps one or two updates released each month. A single cumulative update incorporates not just all of the newest security and reliability fixes, but all the older fixes from previous months, too. If a system isn't updated for a few months or has had its operating system freshly reinstalled, the scenario of having hundreds of individual fixes never occurs. Windows 10 just grabs the latest cumulative update and, with that one package, is more or less up-to-date.

I'm sad to say that my experience with No Man's Sky so far aligns closely with the one Sam Machkovech recounted in our full review. The game's procedurally generated galaxy is beautiful to experience, but actually exploring that galaxy ends up being a mind-numbing grind. Faced with the need to give players something to do in an expansive, enchanting galaxy, developer Hello Games seems to have fallen back on creating very limited versions of the familiar types of gameplay we tend to see in much smaller, more hand-crafted games.

Thus, No Man's Sky features some perfunctory and unsatisfying space- and ground-based combat. There's a low-grade survival mechanic without much in the way of difficulty or appreciable stakes. There's a lot of mind-numbing resource collection and crafting to make minor improvements to your gear. There's a far-off "finish line" goal to work toward through a series of repetitive hyperdrive jumps. There's a lot of frustrating inventory management, made all the more frustrating because every second wasted juggling items in a menu is a second not spent looking at the interesting procedural scenery.

The problem with all of these systems is that they are all pretty antithetical to the core appeal of simply exploring a functionally infinite, non-repeating galaxy of planets. The overall effect is to transform these amazing planets into hunks of rock to be destroyed, threats to be survived, or collections of resources to be bartered rather than mathematical works of art to be admired from inside. The gameplay systems do encourage you to explore, but they don't in any particular way encourage you to enjoy or appreciate what you're exploring.