Month: October 2016

Enlarge / Only joking, honest.

Yesterday, the FBI posted a redacted interview report  (PDF) that sheds more light on what Paul Combetta was trying to do when he turned to Reddit for help modifying an archive of Hillary Clinton's e-mails. (Combetta is the technician contracted to provide support for the hosted mail server used by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.) The report also reveals that Combetta had mentioned a "Hilary [sic] coverup [sic]" in an e-mail thread. Combetta told FBI investigators that the comment was a joke about a change in retention policies.

Combetta's name is redacted from the interviews, but the interviews match up with other information now public about his conversations with the FBI. The interviews, which took place on Feb. 18 at the offices of Platte River Networks in Denver, covered much of the support work Combetta did on the Exchange e-mail server to help users with archived messages—including a July 2014 export of all Clinton messages to .gov addresses. The export was requested by Cheryl Mills, Clinton's former chief of staff at the State Department. Combetta burned the archive on a DVD to mail to Mills, but she then requested a secure electronic transfer of the file. So Combetta arranged the digital transfer and broke the DVD in half.

According to his interview with the FBI, former Clinton IT aide and State Department employee Bryan Pagliano contacted Combetta on July 24 to discuss using a "regular expression text editor" to modify the e-mails in the archive. The reason, Combetta said, was because Pagliano and Mills were concerned that Clinton's new e-mail address—the one that she moved to after leaving the State Department—would be exposed. They were concerned because "when a user changes his or her e-mail address, Outlook updates the old e-mail address with the new e-mail address" in the Exchange mailbox. Combetta was later confirmed as having posted on Reddit, where he asked for help in finding a tool that would allow him to do such a replacement.

(credit: Ken Lund)

Being poor comes with many inadvertent costs, while being rich comes with unexpected benefits. For example, poor people are more likely to be in ill health and have poor dental hygiene, which may cost more money in the long run. In contrast, wealthy people can afford to spend money to maintain their ideal level of fitness.

A recent article published in Royal Society Open Science analyzes another advantage the rich have over the poor: wealthy people are able to sleep until later in the morning. In essence, the rich buy the ability to rest more and commute more efficiently.

The paper in question uses data from human mobility studies, which examine large data sets of human movements in search of patterns at particular times of the day or year. This study uses survey response data from the Colombian cities of Manizales and Medellin. The authors separate their population into six different socioeconomic strata to look at finely tuned differences in economic status. This is possible because, in Colombia, households are legally assigned to a different economic strata according to their physical and environmental characteristics. The Colombian government does this for the purposes of differential public services fees.

An overview of the Schiaparelli descent module's flight down to the Martian surface. (credit: ESA)

On Monday the popular "Sarcastic Rover" Twitter account offered a succinct description for how difficult it is to launch a probe from Earth and place it safely on the surface of Mars: "Landing on Mars is like tossing a baseball from New York to Tokyo and having it drop into a can of soup. Also the can still has a lid on."

While we cannot vouch for the scientific fidelity of the analogy, it seems apt, as many probes that try to land on Mars find a grave instead of a scientific wonderland. Four of the five Soviet landers sent to Mars failed to reach ground safely, and the one that did, Mars 3 in 1971, survived for only about 15 seconds. In 2003, Europe's Mars Express orbiter released the Beagle 2 lander, but its solar panels never fully deployed, and the vehicle never phoned home. Only NASA has had success: impressively, eight of its nine missions to the surface of Mars have made it.

Now Europe is trying again with its ExoMars mission, consisting of an orbiter and lander. On Wednesday morning at 10:42am ET, the European Space Agency's 1.65-meter wide Schiaparelli lander will enter the Martian atmosphere and make a harrowing six-minute descent to the red planet's surface.

Enlarge (credit: Helen H. Richardson via Getty Images)

Half of American adults are in a face-recognition database, according to a Georgetown University study released Wednesday. That means there's about 117 million adults in a law enforcement facial-recognition database, the study by Georgetown's Center on Privacy & Technology says.

"We are not aware of any agency that requires warrants for searches or limits them to serious crimes," the study says.

The report (PDF), titled "The Perpetual Line-up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America," shows that one-fourth of the nation's law enforcement agencies have access to face-recognition databases, and their use by those agencies is virtually unregulated.

Enlarge / Dolores is going outside her loop and hearing some strange voices in her mind. (credit: HBO)

Everything in Westworld is a game. Guests can join robots on quests and missions, or just do a hack-and-slash on poor Teddy. The park workers play power games. And programmers like Ford and Bernard are engaged in a giant mind game with all the robot hosts, whose minds are as big a mystery as the MIB's quest. On this week's Decrypted podcast, we talk with Ars Technica's games editor Kyle Orland about the gameworld of Westworld in episode 3, "The Stray."

Topics discussed include: Julian Jaynes' theory of the bicameral mind (you must do LSD to fully understand it), robot consciousness (it ain't your grandmother's Three Laws of Robotics), Teddy's new backstory with Wyatt (holy crap Wyatt's gang is scary and confusing), Ford's anti-robot racism (he's got issues), the Westworld gameplay (why are there no consequences to getting shot?), the kinds of quests available to guests (they seem very hack-and-slash), whether the MIB is going on fan forums late at night to compare notes about clues he's found in Westworld (definitely maybe he is), moderation and griefers in Westworld (it's complicated), and who among the so-called humans is actually a robot (Bernard? Ford? Lee?).

I'll be analyzing, debating, and dissecting Westworld every week with a different guest, and we'll post the podcast on Tuesdays. The episodes air on Sunday, so you have plenty of time to watch before we get into major spoilers. Yes, there are spoilers. Listen when you're ready!

Data cap cash. (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

Verizon Wireless has agreed to forgive a $20,300 bill sent to a nonprofit that was accused of using 1.3TB of data from one phone in just 10 days.

Horizon Education Centers of Cleveland, Ohio fought Verizon for three months over the June 2016 bill before finally complaining to The Plain Dealer of Cleveland and the Federal Communications Commission. The newspaper has been publishing a series of stories about surprising data overage bills that cast doubt on the accuracy of Verizon's data usage meter.

"In the most dramatic case, Verizon on Friday agreed to wipe out a $20,300 bill to a Cleveland non-profit for supposedly using 1,300 gigabytes of data in one month," The Plain Dealer wrote today.

Enlarge / A system view, with navigation between planets, and a fleet status? This is looking very Star Control to me! (credit: Stardock)

All right, *campers*, there’s some new news lurking on the horizon for Star Control fans eager to find a new *happy town*. This morning, Stardock founder Brad Wardell announced the official name of the company’s upcoming Star Control prequel: Star Control: Origins. Wardell has also offered up the first public gameplay video:

(video link)

Today’s announcement also gives us a tentative release date and an early price: the game will be coming to Windows and consoles, and the PC release will be in the second half of 2017. For $35 (£30), players can join the studio’s “Founder’s Program” and get access to the closed beta and some additional developer goodies.