Month: September 2019

Enlarge / The Dallas County, Iowa courthouse, the site of a penetration test gone wrong. (credit: By Iowahwyman - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0)

In a post to the Iowa Judicial Branch website today, a spokesperson for the state's court administration released redacted images of the documents associated with the security tests that landed two penetration testers in jail earlier this month. The "rules of engagement" document for the contract shows that the state court administration did request a physical security assessment from the security firm Coalfire. State officials say that Coalfire's employees interpreted the documents differently than they had. But it would appear that the real problem behind the arrest of Coalfire's team is a turf war between state and county officials—and whether the state judicial administrators had cleared the security tests with local authorities.

In the post, the Iowa Judicial Branch spokesperson wrote:

Coalfire and State Court Administration believed they were in agreement regarding the physical security assessments for the locations included in the scope of work…yet, recent events have shown that Coalfire and State Court Administration had different interpretations of the scope of the agreement. Together, Coalfire and State Court Administration continue to navigate through this process.

State Court Administration has worked with Coalfire in the past to conduct security testing of its data and welcomed the opportunity to work with them again. Both organizations value the importance of protecting the safety and security of employees as well as the integrity of data.

State Court Administration apologizes to the sheriffs and boards of supervisors of Dallas County and Polk County for the confusion and impact these incidents have caused.

The document showed that the state authorized Coalfire's team to "perform lock-picking activities to attempt to gain access to locked areas." But the document also stated the testers should "talk your way into areas" and allowed for "limited physical bypass."

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  The new Roku Express with its remote. [credit: Roku ]

Ahead of the holiday season, Roku made some minor updates to its media-streamer lineup as well as its Roku software as a whole. You won't find any totally new Roku devices this year, but you'll find an updated, $29 Roku Express player that's smaller and uses less power as well as an updated, $99 Roku Ultra set-top box with a new remote that has customizable shortcut buttons.

Roku Express remains the company's most affordable streaming device at $29. The new version is 10% smaller than its predecessor and comes with an adhesive strip so you can attach it to the back of your TV. But more exciting are the updates to its internals—the new Express runs on less power than the previous model, and it can draw power from your TV if you plug it into one of the TV's USB ports. That means you don't need to plug this device into a wall outlet or other power source in order to use it—just plug it into both a USB port and your TV's HDMI port to start streaming.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Roku Ultra, the company's top-tier streaming device that costs $99. The new version will remain at that price point, but it has a faster quad-core processor and more memory, which should help the device launch channels faster than the previous model. Instead of overhauling the Ultra's design, Roku focused more on performance in hopes that it could remove as much lag and slowness as possible so users can get to their content faster. This will purportedly come in handy with content that cord-cutters gravitate toward, like live news and sports coming from any number of free and subscription services.

Enlarge / As far as we know, none of the storage vendors using AI have gone neuromorphic yet—let alone biological. (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty)

While the words "artificial intelligence" generally conjure up visions of Skynet, HAL 9000, and the Demon Seed, machine learning and other types of AI technology have already been brought to bear on many analytical tasks, doing things that humans can't or don't want to do—from catching malware to predicting when jet engines need repair. Now it's getting attention for another seemingly impossible task for humans: properly configuring data storage.

As the scale and complexity of storage workloads increase, it becomes more and more difficult to manage them efficiently. Jobs that could originally be planned and managed by a single storage architect now require increasingly large teams of specialists—which sets the stage for artificial intelligence (née machine learning) techniques to enter the picture, allowing fewer storage engineers to effectively manage larger and more diverse workloads.

Storage administrators have five major metrics they contend with, and finding a balance among them to match application demands approaches being a dark art. Those metrics are:

Enlarge / Welcome back to Koholint Island, the world of Link's Awakening, newly reborn as a lively, plasticky world of toys. (credit: Nintendo)

What can you expect from an official remake of a Nintendo classic? For nearly three decades, the answer has been all over the map. Sometimes, the company serves a graphical touch-up and nothing more. Sometimes, we get a full redo of a classic with new controls, mechanics, and plot. There's also an in-between zone where a classic returns more-or-less authentically but with clear "quality-of-life" changes and other surprise twists.

This year's remake of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening, which debuted on the original Game Boy in 1993, stands alone in the company's re-release pantheon. No Nintendo game has ever returned with this much of a luxurious, jaw-dropping coat of audio-visual paint—while also gripping so fiercely to its original gameplay. As a result, you may not find a more polarizing first-party game on the Nintendo Switch.

Spoiler alert: It’s pretty much the same

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  The steps you'll take to reclaim your sword on Koholint Island's beach are identical to the Game Boy original.

Let's be frank: You can spoil most of the new Link's Awakening by watching an existing YouTube playthrough of the Game Boy original. It's that allegiant to the source material, right down to the placement of terrain, enemies, and doorways. Need to solve a puzzle? Wondering where one of the game's "seashell" collectibles is hiding? Stuck on a boss's weak point? Go ahead, read an ASCII-formatted, decades-old walkthrough on a site like GameFAQs. It'll work.

Nintendo has rewound to a very specific adventure design era, somewhere between 1986's Legend of Zelda and 1991's Link To The Past, by re-releasing its final 8-bit Zelda game in such authentic fashion. What does that mean, exactly? On a basic level, this is top-down Zelda adventuring of old. You play as Link, an adventuring child in a green tunic who wakes up under mysterious circumstances. You proceed through a large overworld and its many dungeons to acquire keys and items while battling monsters and bosses. And many of the world's puzzles hinge on finding and using brand-new items.

Enlarge / NASA conceptional artwork for the Exploration Upper Stage carrying the Orion spacecraft. (credit: NASA)

During a hearing of the House space subcommittee on Wednesday, the outlines of a battle over the future of NASA's Artemis Moon program emerged. Yet it was not a partisan fight over whether the Republican White House plan to land humans on the Moon by 2024 should or shouldn't happen. Instead, some members of both political parties questioned how the space agency planned to conduct the Artemis program.

These members, including Oklahoma Democratic representative and committee chair Kendra Horn, as well as Alabama Republican representative Mo Brooks, were particularly skeptical of private rockets in their comments and questions during the hearing. They also pressed NASA on why the agency is not moving more quickly with development of a powerful second stage upgrade for the agency's Space Launch System rocket. This "Exploration Upper Stage" would increase the amount of mass the rocket could send to the Moon from 26 tons to 37 tons.

Wednesday's hearing was notable because it appears to mark an escalation in an intense lobbying battle going on behind the scenes by some contractors—most likely led by Boeing—to kill NASA's proposed Lunar Gateway and instead accelerate funding for the Exploration Upper Stage.