Month: September 2016

Enlarge (credit: scyther5/Getty Images)

it's hard enough to get a new job these days, and it's even harder to get one when your prospective employer thinks you're a convicted criminal even though you're not.

And if you have a name like David Smith, the odds increase that you'll be mistaken of being a convicted criminal because there's so many people named David Smith out there. Exacerbating the situation is when background check giants like LexisNexis Screening Solutions claims it should be forgiven for bungling a background check because it was following "industry standards." And the industry standard, LexisNexis says, means it doesn't always have to run a middle name through the system—even when there are some 125,000 people with the name "David Smith" in the United States.

That was, in part, LexisNexis' defense to a lawsuit brought by a man named David Alan Smith, who claimed LexisNexis' conduct for erroneously fingering him as a convict was willful and negligent, and violated the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Enlarge / A world map used in Watch the Skies. (credit: Paul Dean)

Welcome to Ars Cardboard, our weekend look at tabletop games! Check out our complete board gaming coverage at cardboard.arstechnica.com.

There’s a new and very special sort of hybrid game doing the rounds, a marriage between the large scale politicking of live-action roleplaying (LARPs) and the focused, often crunchy mechanics of an economic game. It’s played with dozens, even hundreds of players, it takes a whole day, and it has a slightly clumsy sobriquet that perfectly encapsulates its grand ambition: the “megagame.”

Megagames have no strict definition, but here’s an outline of the (pretty typical) first one that I tried, two years ago now. Strange alien forces mass near the earth, alarming the world’s governments. Multiple teams of three to six players represent various nations, and teams take on roles like diplomats or military leaders. Each plays its own straightforward game of economics to balance the country’s budget, fund the military, and direct scientific research.

Enlarge / The Game Boy Advance SP and its external ports. Notice anything missing?

A leading technology company announces the next in its successful and long-standing line of handheld hardware. The new update sports plenty of long-awaited features, including an improved screen and a better battery. But it also includes one major omission: the standard 3.5mm headphone jack, which had been included on all of its portable products until this point, has been replaced by a proprietary standard. Many in the press are livid, and consumers largely react with confusion, but many shrug it off and decide to buy the product anyway.

This introduction could obviously describe the current brouhaha surrounding the release of the headphone jack-free iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. But you may not remember that it also describes Nintendo's release of the Game Boy Advance SP way back in 2003.

Nintendo's mid-generation revamp of the original Game Boy Advance didn't improve on the internal processing power of the core system. It didn't support any games that weren't also supported by 2001's standard Game Boy Advance. Still, the GBA SP drew interest as the first Game Boy to sport an internal battery pack (boasting 10 to 18 hours of continuous play) and the first to include a frontlit screen, for playing in dark rooms. It also sported a trendy flip-top design that protected the screen when not in use and made the unit easy to fit in a pocket.

NASA's Curiosity probe had two primary tasks after landing on Mars in 2012—explore the Martian plains where it had landed, then climb Mount Sharp, which tops out at 5,486 meters. The data the rover sent back after exploring ancient lake beds in the plains suggests these beds would have been favorable for microbial life, if any ever existed on ancient Mars. But Curiosity's more recent attempt to ascend the lower slopes of Mount Sharp was blocked by sand dunes.

So the scientists decided to drive the rover around the dunes to find a "pass" through to the mountain. They did so via an area called the Murray Buttes, named after famed scientist Bruce Murray, a co-founder of The Planetary Society. These buttes and small mesas are mostly between 5 to 10 meters high and about the length and width of a football field. They also gave Curiosity an opportunity to make interesting geological observations, as the images in the photo gallery attest.

Curiosity, which has now driven more than 14km across the surface of Mars, spent about a month following a valley through the middle of the Murray Buttes. And after performing a final drill sampling on September 9, it exited the buttes and drove southward toward the mountain. With a two-year extension approved by NASA, Curiosity should continue climbing until at least October 2018 and hopefully much longer after that.

(credit: Oliver Wunder remixed by Aurich Lawson)

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has asked President Barack Obama for a pardon, and the ACLU, which represents Snowden in the US, agrees. The following piece is a response to Snowden's argument. The author, Jack Goldsmith, is a Harvard Law professor and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. This piece first appeared at Lawfare.

A “pardon Snowden” campaign was launched Wednesday in conjunction with the Snowden film. Snowden himself made the “moral case” for why he should be pardoned, and Tim Edgar made a much more powerful case. I remain unconvinced. I don’t think the president will, or should, pardon Snowden.

I say this even though I agree with Tim about many of the upsides to Snowden’s theft and leak of documents from NSA databases. On the third anniversary of the Snowden disclosures, I wrote about how, despite their many costs, the disclosures strengthened the intelligence community. They forced the NSA to be more transparent and to better explain itself, demonstrated that the NSA was acting with the full knowledge and support of three branches, resulted in its authorities being strengthened and its collection practices barely narrowed (and in some respects expanded), and overall enhanced its domestic legitimacy going forward. I was not kidding when I said that “[t]hese are but some of the public services for which the US government has Snowden to thank.” This was not a new theme with me. I have made similar points for years. (See here and here and here and here.)