Month: February 2019

Enlarge (credit: EA / Bioware)

BioWare, the developer responsible for Mass Effect and Dragon Age, has returned with its first new series in over a decade, Anthem. It's a pretty big departure for the RPG-heavy studio: a jetpack-fueled, action-first online "looter-shooter." And after a disastrous demo launched weeks ago, we wondered whether we'd even get a playable game.

The good news is that we did, and at its best, Anthem feels brilliant, beautiful, and thrilling. At its worst, though, this is a stuttering, confusing, heartfelt mess of an action game.

The good stuff Anthem ultimately offers—artistic design, BioWare-caliber plot, and that freakin' Iron Man feeling—fails to coalesce. Players are expected to log in again and again for missions with friends in true "online shared shooter" style (à la Destiny and Warframe), but the game's inherent structure makes this basic loop difficult to pull off.

Enlarge / We think copyright's fair use doctrine allows us to show you this screenshot from the Verge's video. (credit: The Verge)

Last week, The Verge got a reminder about the power of the Streisand effect after its lawyers issued copyright takedown requests for two YouTube videos that criticized—and heavily excerpted—a video by The Verge. Each takedown came with a copyright "strike." It was a big deal for the creators of the videos because three "strikes" in a 90-day period are enough to get a YouTuber permanently banned from the platform.

The move sparked an online backlash, and The Verge quickly reversed itself and asked YouTube to reinstate the videos in question. But Verge editor Nilay Patel (who, full disclosure, was briefly a colleague of mine at The Verge's sister publication Vox.com) insists that the videos "crossed the line" into copyright infringement.

It's hard to be sure if this is true since there are very few precedents in this area of the law. But the one legal precedent I was able to find suggests the opposite: that this kind of video is solidly within the bounds of copyright's fair use doctrine.

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Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 users will imminently have to deploy a mandatory patch if they want to continue updating their systems, as spotted by Mary Jo Foley.

Currently, Microsoft's Windows updates use two different hashing algorithms to enable Windows to detect tampering or modification of the update files: SHA-1 and SHA-2. Windows 7 and Server 2008 verify the SHA-1 patches; Windows 8 and newer use the SHA-2 hashes instead. March's Patch Tuesday will include a standalone update for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and WSUS to provide support for patches hashed with SHA-2. April's Patch Tuesday will include an equivalent update for Windows Server 2008.

The SHA-1 algorithm, first published in 1995, takes some input and produces a value known as a hash or a digest that's 20 bytes long. By design, any small change to the input should produce, with high probability, a wildly different hash value. SHA-1 is no longer considered to be secure, as well-funded organizations have managed to generate hash collisions—two different files that nonetheless have the same SHA-1 hash. If a collision could be generated for a Windows update, it would be possible for an attacker to produce a malicious update that nonetheless appeared to the system to have been produced by Microsoft and not subsequently altered.

Enlarge / A booster for NASA’s Space Launch System is successfully fired in 2016. (credit: NASA)

During the last 15 years, the US Congress has authorized budgets totaling $46 billion for various NASA deep-space exploration plans. By late summer, 2020, that total is likely to exceed $50 billion, most of which has been spent on developing a heavy-lift rocket and deep space capsule that may carry humans into deep space.

In a new analysis that includes NASA's recently approved fiscal year 2019 budget, aerospace analyst Laura Forczyk found that, of this total, NASA has spent $16 billion on the Orion capsule, $14 billion on the Space Launch System rocket, and most of the remainder on ground systems development along with the Ares I and Ares V rockets.

For all of this spending on "exploration programs" since 2005, NASA has demonstrated relatively little spaceflight capability. The Ares I launch vehicle flew one time, in 2009, to an altitude of just 40km. (It had a dummy upper stage and fake capsule). The Ares project, as part of NASA's Constellation Program, would be abandoned the next year, as it was behind schedule and over budget. Later, in 2014, NASA launched an uncrewed version of its Orion spacecraft on a private rocket to an altitude of 400km. The first flight of the new SLS rocket, again with an uncrewed Orion vehicle, may occur in 2021.

Enlarge / 07 February 2019, Saxony-Anhalt, Halle (Saale): In the genetic engineering monitoring laboratory of the State Office for Environmental Protection of Saxony-Anhalt, Damaris Horn is sipping reaction preparations for the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in a special cabin. (credit: Picture Alliance | Getty Images )

Of late, gene editing has been in the news due to an ethically reckless experiment in which human embryos were subjected to an inefficient form of gene editing. The subjects, now born, gained uncertain protection from HIV in exchange for a large collection of potential risks. A large number of ethicists and scientists agreed that this isn't the sort of thing we should be using gene editing for.

That response contains an implicit corollary: there are some things that might justify the use of gene editing in humans. Now, a series of papers looks at some reasonable use cases in mice and collectively find that the technology really isn't ready for use yet.

Use cases

Gene editing will likely always come with a bit of risk; when you're cutting and pasting DNA in millions of cells, extremely rare events can't be avoided. So the ethical questions come down to how we can minimize those risks, and what conditions make them worth taking.